Enel Green Power Chile, the Chile-based renewables arm of Italian energy company Enel, has started commercial operations at its 398MW Guanchoi solar plant in Chile, the country’s largest single solar facility by capacity.
The company began construction on the project in the commune of Chañaral in the Atacama region of northern Chile in 2021. Enel completed work this year, and yesterday received approval from Chile’s National Electricity Coordinator to begin commercial operations at a project that has now overtaken Empresa Acciona’s 246MW El Romero plant in central Chile.
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Among the highlights of the project are its use of bifacial PV panels, those which collect sunlight on both sides, which Enel claims will generate 14% more electricity than “conventional panels”. With the Atacama region having one of the best solar irradiation in the world and its desert nature, the use of bifacial modules has they’ll give an optimal result in the region. Bifacial modules are of particular interest to the solar sector currently, with the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory noting that bifacial perovskite cells in particular could generate 20% more electricity than monofacial perovskite cells this week.
Considering the large scale of the Guanchoi project, with almost 900,000 solar panels in operation, the effective deployment of large-scale bifacial modules could be an important proof of concept for the solar industry at large.
The project is the latest to be added to the portfolio of Enel Chile, Enel’s Chilean subsidiary which was launched in 2016, and aims to manage power generation in the country. While the group has not focused exclusively on renewable power – in 2022 it boasted a total installed capacity of 8.4GW across renewable and non-renewable operations – the group is placing increasing emphasis on its renewable power projects.
Between 2019 and 2022, Enel Chile connected 1.7GW of renewable power capacity, and Enel Green Power Chile currently manages a solar portfolio of over 2GW. The start of operations at Guanchoi will bring Enel Green Power Chile’s total installed renewable capacity up to 3.3GW, and the company’s progress fits the recent trend of solar uptake across Chile.
Between 2012 and 2022, the production of electricity from solar facilities in Chile increased from less than 0.01TWh to 37.69TWh, a much faster rate of growth than in the wind sector, where wind production increased from 1.12TWh to 24.42TWh over the same period. However, with coal, oil and gas accounting for collectively around 350TWh of generation in 2022, work remains to be done to fully decarbonise the country’s energy mix.
The news follows plans announced by German firm Goldbeck Solar to build 24MWp of new solar projects in Chile’s Bío-Bío province earlier this month, as international energy companies take an increasing interest in the Chilean solar sector.