The curtailment of solar PV and wind capacity in Chile has reached 3.2TWh as of August 2025, according to Ana Lía Rojas, executive director at the Chilean renewable energy and energy storage association (ACERA), the keynote speaker at the fourth edition of Solar Media’s Energy Storage Summit Latin America 2025, which began in Santiago, Chile, today.
This is a slight increase from the same period a year ago, as shown in the image above, but the rate of growth is not as fast as the increase in curtailment between 2023 and 2024. In 2024, nearly 6TWh of solar PV and wind capacity ended up curtailed, which represented a 133% growth from the previous year.
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Rojas added that last year, 2.2TWh of new solar PV generation was added to the Chilean grid, but the curtailment for solar PV increased by 2.7TWh, which shows a problem.
Despite that issue, the renewables landscape in the country is still very promising, with 30.2GW of projects receiving environmental approval across all renewable power technologies, of which 19.9GW is for solar PV and 2.9GW is for storage. There is a further 22GW that are awaiting environmental approval, of which 6.8GW are from standalone battery energy storage systems (BESS), explained Rojas.
Rojas added that “the rise of electricity demand is a crucial element” in Chile, otherwise the country’s energy mix will meet some of the same block roads that have hampered the technological expansion that has happened in the last few years in Chile.
Moreover, if this the demand growth does not happen, the grid will be faced with “all kinds of cannibalisation,” not just between renewables but across all energies and markets, from utilities to distributed or Pequeños Medios de Generación Distribuida (PMGD) programme.
“The message is a policy of deep electrification, here and now,” concluded Rojas.
For more details about the Energy Storage Summit Latin America which is being held in Santiago, Chile today and tomorrow, you can access here.
