French energy giant TotalEnergies and Spanish solar tracker manufacturer Soltec have received construction authorisation for a 200MW solar PV project in Murcia, Spain.
Construction of the Luminora Solar Dos PV project will begin in 2024. The project will feature over 337,000 bifacial solar PV modules and more than 5,300 solar trackers.
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“Obtaining the construction permit for this project is a major step forward that will allow us to contribute both to the decarbonisation of the environment and the development of local economies, all while ensuring the protection of the biodiversity of the surrounding area,” said Yago Mancebo, general manager of TotalEnergies Renewables Spain.
In January, Soltec announced that the Spanish Department of Environmental Transition had allowed Soltec to develop 16 PV plants amounting to 401MW of peak power in Murcia and Alicante provinces, 352MW of which will be co-developed with TotalEnergies.
Prior to this project, TotalEnergies reached commercial operations of a 380MWp solar-plus-storage project in Texas, US. Located south of Houston, Myrtle Solar is co-located with 225MWh of energy storage systems supplied by affiliate entity Saft, and includes 705,000 solar panels. Most of the capacity of the plant, 70%, will be supplied to the company’s own industrial plants in the US Golf Coast region, while the remaining 30% will be supplied to real estate firm Kilroy Realty under a 15-year corporate power purchase agreement (cPPA) indexed on merchant prices.
Additionally, Soltec published its financial results for the first half of the year in late September, in which the company posted revenues of €184.5 million (US$194.2 million), earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) of -€10.2 million and a net loss of €14.4 million. The company attributed some of these financial struggles and seasonality of business to “low volumes of activity in the first half of the year”, due to the extension in the deadlines of certain administrative processes in Spain and the publication of the guidelines for the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) in the US.
Despite the loss, Soltec recently told PV Tech Premium that it is optimistic about the company’s future, aiming to double the revenues generated by its US facilities between 2022 and 2025, as Soltec CEO Raúl Morales said the company had seen a significant uptick in the demand for solar trackers, both in the overall solar industry and particularly in the US.
| PV Tech publisher Solar Media will be organising the 11th annual edition of Large Scale Solar Europe in Lisbon, Portugal during 21-22 March. The event will explore the future solar markets of Portugal, Spain and Italy and with panels around securing faster grid connection, solar-wind hybrid projects and the integration of storage with solar PV among others. |