Portugal’s first-ever solar photovoltaic (PV) auction for 1.4 gigawatts (GW) tender has received offers for 10GW and 64 companies have shown interest to develop solar power projects. The overwhelming response from international and domestic developers has enabled Portugal to strengthen its claim as Europe’s emerging market for solar PV installations, says GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company.

Portugal has plans to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050 and aims to meet 80% of its total power demand from clean energy generation by 2030. In order to achieve these targets, the Government aims to harness the solar potential and targets solar PV capacity installation to be 1.6GW in 2021 and 8.1GW-9.9GW by 2030.

Tarun Bhutani, Project Manager at GlobalData, says: “The auction aims to have these large-scale solar projects in the southern zones of Alto Alentejo, Baixo Alentejo, and Algarve. This is a strategic move as South Algarve and the North Alentejo areas are among the highest solar radiation sites in Europe.”

According to GlobalData, Portugal has 1.22GW of solar PV capacity in the pipeline already which is under different stages of development. Installed capacity for solar PV is forecast to be 1.74GW by 2023. Considering allocation of the current auction and second auction planned in January 2020, the capacity forecast for 2023 is set to go higher in the range of 3.8GW-4.3GW.

Bhutani concludes: “Solar PV is achieving grid parity and is becoming increasingly competitive amongst wholesale power markets to push forward subsidy free project installations. “