Image: jtnhogs, flickr
The Argentinean government will hold a new round of its RenovAr renewable energy procurement program by the end of this year, according to a statement provided to pv magazine by Marcelo Álvarez, the president of Cámara Argentina de Energías Renovables (CADER), a local renewable energy industry body. The Argentinean Ministry of Renewable Energy, Sebastián Kind, made the announcement at a conference in Spain. “We are working on the matter, but there is still nothing official to communicate about it,” the Ministry of Energy and Mines said to pv magazine.
The fifth round of the scheme, which will be named “Ronda 4”, will include grid infrastructure projects, along with expected large-scale wind and solar power projects.
The announcement of the new tender round is good news for Argentina’s renewable energy sector, as the government said in August that it would not hold the planned “Round 4” round until after 2019. At the time, the government pointed to grid constraints and financing difficulties as issues that would have resulted in higher final prices.
However, after suspending Ronda 4, the Argentinean government launched a “mini-tender” for 400 MW of renewables capacity within the RenovAr program. This round was limited to projects up to 10 MW in size, with a total capacity quota for wind and solar of 350 MW. Under the first three rounds of the RenovAr program, 1.7 GW of solar projects were approved. In the last round, the lowest price for solar was $40.4/MWh, while the highest and average prices were $52.3/MWh and $43.5/MWh, respectively.
Source: pv magazine
