Canadian Solar’s owner-operator subsidiary Recurrent Energy has announced the start of commercial operations at the 200MWp Villameca Project in Castilla y León, Spain.
Recurrent Energy said that it expects to have 1GW of operational solar capacity in Spain by the end of this year, alongside the company’s 426MWp Rey Solar Project in Andalucía and the 315MWp Tordesillas Project in Castilla y León.
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Dylan Marx, CEO of Recurrent Energy, said: “We are particularly proud of this project’s impact and the high level of social and biodiversity commitments achieved throughout its development.”
During permitting and construction, the project won UNEF’s Seal of Excellence in recognition of the plant’s high sustainability standards. It supports community facilities, education, social initiatives, habitat restoration, native vegetation planting and measures that protect the local wildlife.
The Villameca Project is expected to be hybridised with the addition of battery energy storage systems (BESS), the company says, an addition that is more usually part of a large-scale facility’s design. Retrofitting BESS onto existing solar PV projects can prove challenging, and Sam Kuhlwein, director of product at US clean energy company Stem, will write a piece to be published in the next issue of PV Tech Power on minimising the cost of such retrofits.
Recurrent Energy has announced other progress in solar-plus-storage projects, including the grid connection of the Montalto La Viola project in Italy. The company also operates the 360MW Sundown Energy Park in Australia, which is co-located with a 4-hour 150MW BESS.
In August this year, Recurrent Energy started commercial operations at the Carwarp Energy park in Victoria, Australia, providing at least some of its 150MW output under a power purchase agreement (PPA) with technology provider Microsoft.
