20.6 GW Of Solar Energy Project Proposals For Upcoming Brazilian Auction

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The upcoming national renewable energy auction in Brazil has received 20.593 gigawatts (GW) of solar energy project proposals (across 649 different bids) to date, according to recent reports.

This means that solar project proposals have managed to eclipse wind energy ones by a fair bit — as wind project proposals total 17.964 GW (across 730 proposals), a notable occurrence for wind energy–loving Brazil. I think this means that the “solar revolution” in Brazil is now starting to really gather pace.

Both solar and wind energy bids have been heavily oversubscribed, though, so it remains to be seen how many projects actually move forward. It’s not yet clear by how much the auctions were oversubscribed, though, as the Brazilian Ministry for Mines and Energy has yet to reveal that. Given that the auction’s not being held until November 13th, we may have to wait a bit until we find out more.

Brazil’s first national solar energy auction was held just last year, and that one saw over 1 GW of new solar energy projects started in the heavily solar-insolated country — which currently only possesses around 15 MW of cumulative solar energy generation capacity.

Under the terms of the auction, winning bidders need to have their projects fully operational by November 2018 in order to receive their 20-year power purchase agreements (PPAs).

Amongst the bidders, the region of Bahia tops the list with 192 different proposals, altogether totaling 6.05 GW of potential generation capacity, as well as 243 wind energy proposals — also for a total of 6.05 GW of potential generation capacity.

The region of Rio Grande do Norte saw a fair number of proposals as well, with 97 different solar energy proposals, totaling 3.315 GW of proposed capacity and 184 different wind energy proposals (for a total of 4.333 GW of proposed capacity).

The November auction is being presaged by a solar-energy-only auction set for later this month (August 28), which has 382 registered proposals (altogether totaling 12.528 GW of proposed capacity).

Image by Eduardo Amorim (some rights reserved)