December 2024 saw a little over 2GW of power purchase agreements (PPAs) contracted in Europe, making it the second strongest month of the year for offtake deals.
Figures released in Swiss consultancy Pexapark’s monthly PPA tracker recorded 27 separate deals, including what it said was a record nine utility PPAs as larger players sought to close off deals before the start of the new year.
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Among the notable deals tracked by Pexapark was a ten-year solar PPA between Canadian Solar subsidiary Recurrent Energy and an undisclosed US technology company. The offtaker will buy power from the 300MW Tordesillas project PV project in Valladolid, northern Spain.
PPAs shrink in 2024
Pexapark said it would provide a more detailed analysis of 2024’s PPA deal flow in its annual market update next week but highlighted a number of clear themes from 2024.
Notably, it said the largest PPAs of 2024 were significantly smaller than in 2023, with the largest deal of 2024 standing at 596MW compared to 869MW in 2023.
Pexapark also noted that the spread between technologies was more even in 2024 than 2023. In that year, solar dominated the deal flow, accounting for 80% of PPA volumes, whereas in 2024, onshore wind in particular had a more significant presence in contracted PPAs, Pexapark said.
The largest solar-specific PPA of 2024 was a 350MW, 20-year deal in France, between decentralised PV specialist GreenYellow and supermarket group Carrefour. Rather than coming from a single large project, the energy bought under the PPA will come from a number of distributed solar canopies above Carrefour’s carparks across France.
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