Swiss power company Axpo has signed a power purchase agreement (PPA) with German electricity producer RWE for all of the latter’s renewable power production capacity in Poland.
Axpo will offtake a combined 1,500GWh of solar PV and wind power annually from RWE Renewables Poland’s 628MW capacity project portfolio. The companies did not disclose the duration of the PPA.
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RWE entered the Polish market in 2007, and has since reached over 150MW of solar PV operational or under development. In December, the company was awarded 66MW of solar PV capacity under the Polish government’s Contracts for Difference (CfD) scheme. The projects were all slated for construction this year.
The company forecasts that solar PV will be its largest renewable energy generation technology by 2030.
Axpo Polska head of origination and board member, Mateusz Marczewski, said that this deal is “one of the largest solar and wind energy offtake agreements to be signed in recent times in Poland.”
Robert Macias, RWE Renewables Poland board member, said: “With Axpo on our side the green electricity produced by our wind and solar fleet will be efficiently marketed – a win-win for the Polish energy transition.”
Much of RWE’s recent activity has been in the larger markets of the US and Germany. Earlier this month the company signed 274MW of PPAs with social media giant Meta for a solar portfolio in Illinois and Louisiana. A week earlier, RWE’s power trading arm signed a 170MW PPA in Germany with a steel manufacturer, to offtake power from the Boitzenburger Land solar park in Brandenburg.
Notwithstanding the attraction of these two solar market giants, Poland has become a heavy hitter in its own right. As of April this year, its installed solar capacity exceeded 17GW according to the Institute for Renewable Energy (IEO), a Polish research group.
Until this year the Polish solar market had been boosted and supported by favourable terms for small, distributed and residential solar systems. However, as discussed in the last edition of our downstream journal, PV Tech Power, the utility-scale market is gathering pace in Poland as the ecosystem for small-scale solar begins to wind down.
