SunEdison and the Latin American arm of Italian developer Enel Green Power have emerged as two of the big-name winners from Brazil’s successful solar auction last week.
After several unsuccessful attempts to attract bidders to build PV in Brazil, interest in solar finally ignited in the country’s reserve power auction held on Friday, which saw contracts for almost 890MW of PV projects awarded.
Brazil’s Renova Energia sold solar PV projects worth 106.9MW under the auction and said shortly afterwards that it had chosen SunEdison Singapore to supply modules for the projects.
SunEdison is already an active player in project development itself in Latin America, having completed Chile’s first utility-scale PV plant and pursuing a multi-hundred megawatt project pipeline across the region.
Renova Energia said the equipment supplied by SunEdison would be compliant with local manufacturing requirements specified by Brazil’s BNDES bank.
Meanwhile, Enel said it had been awarded 254MW of PV capacity in the auction, almost a quarter of the total.
The company will develop the ‘Ituverava’ project in Bahia, a state Enel said was noted for the high levels of solar radiation it receives.
It said power for the plant, which will cost around US$400 million to build, would be sold under a 20-year power purchase agreement with the Brazilian Chamber of Commercialization of Electric Energy.
