Construction of a 50MW PV plant in the town of Carmona, Seville province, Spain by Endesa through its subsidiary Enel Green Power Spain has begun. Construction of the PV plant, known as “Los Naranjos”, which is set to be completed by the end of 2020, will involve an investment of US $30.9m.
The PV plant
Los Naranjos will be composed of 128,520 PV panels of 340 Wp[1] each. To operate the facilities, Endesa, through EGPE, will build 9 switching stations, an electric substation and an underground cable network spanning 4.5km. The facility is expected to come online in late 2020 and once operational, it will produce about 100 GWh a year, hence avoiding the emission of approximately 67,000 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year.
Since the end of 2019, EGPE has been building another 50 MW “Las Corchas” PV plant in Carmona, in which it will it is investing US $32.9m. These two facilities are the company’s biggest PV plant developed in Andalusia to date, with a combined capacity of around 100MW.
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Decarbonizing the generation mix by 2050
The construction of this renewable capacity is part of Endesa’s strategy to fully decarbonize its generation mix by 2050; based on the company’s current Strategic Plan, the goal is to achieve an installed renewable capacity of 10.2 GW by 2022, compared to the 7.4 GW in 2019, which include the 879MW under the 2017 auctions, for a total investment of US $4.2bn.
These plants will be built under sustainable engineering criteria, whereby Enel Green Power’s “Sustainable Construction Site” model will be applied. This model envisages the installation of PV panels to meet some of the energy needs during the construction works and water saving measures by installing deposits and rain collection systems. Once the works have been completed, both the PV panels and the water saving equipment will be donated to the town for public use. These initiatives have been included as sustainable engineering actions as part of the 2018 Climate Projects by Spain’s Ministry of Ecological Transition (MITECO).
Endesa currently manages, through EGPE, over 7,438MW of renewable capacity in Spain. Of this amount, 4,701MW is conventional hydro power and the remaining 2,737MW are from wind power (2,292MW), solar power (352MW), mini-hydro (79MW) and other renewable energy sources (14MW).
