Argentina launches a 620 MW wind power and solar tender for the first time

The government launched a new tender to expand the renewable energy generation and storage park in the country. It is the first concrete initiative of the management of Alberto Fernández in this direction. The call foresees awarding 620 MW that would add around US$ 500 million of investment. The role of the nodes in the call in a saturated system.

The government launched a public tender to expand the supply of the renewable energy generation park in the country. This is the RenMDI call that will try to reach 620 MW of power. Since he took office, it is the first concrete initiative of the management of Alberto Fernández to increase the renewable generation park. The measure was published this Thursday in the Official Gazette through Resolution 36, signed by the Secretary of Energy, Flavia Royón.

If all the power planned in the tender is awarded, the investment in the sector would be around US$ 500 million, according to sources consulted by EconoJournal. The RenMDI call will be through 15-year dollar contracts with Cammesa, the company that manages the wholesale electricity market, and seasonality will be remunerated to encourage generation in periods of higher demand. It is focused on four renewable technologies: solar with and without storage, wind only with storage, biogas and biomass.
lines

The tender is divided into two parts: the first line seeks to replace 500 MW of forced generation, which is operated by inefficient and more expensive generating units, through new renewable technology projects such as solar photovoltaic, solar photovoltaic with storage, biomass and wind with storage, clarifies the annex of the call.

The second line is 120 MW and will seek to diversify the matrix (not replace forced generation) with sources of biogas, landfill biogas, small hydroelectric developments, and biomass. Both lines have power limits and the bidding is divided into regions that, in turn, will compete among themselves in the certification.

The new plants that are built under the RenMDI tender will not have dispatch priority over other generation, self-generation or renewable cogeneration parks. The resolution clarifies that the new projects will not be covered by the guarantees granted by the Fund for the Development of Renewable Energies (FODER) to the beneficiaries of the RenovAr program.

In addition, the bidders will support compliance with all the obligations required in the specifications “constituting a guarantee of seriousness and maintenance of their offers” by means of a guarantee payment to Cammesa. The value will depend on the power offered, which ranges from projects of less than 0.5 MW to more than 20 MW, and the amounts are between $450,000 to $7,200,000.
transport and nodes

The main bottleneck that the renewable generation park had in recent years was the saturation of energy transport. There is no capacity to incorporate new generation. From the Executive, measures were promoted to release the transportation capacity retained by previous tenders, especially from the RenovAr program calls. Much of that released capacity was occupied with projects in the Renewable Energy Term Market (Mater), which are agreements between private parties.

For this reason, for this RenMDI tender, the government identified nodes with available transmission capacity, sources consulted by EconoJournal indicated. In fact, the tender will not focus on wind technology without storage (of the 5,189 MW of installed renewable energy capacity in the country, wind farms add up to 3,310 MW) because the nodes where the energy from the wind farms enters are already they are saturated. In other words, the vast majority of the offers in this new tender will be for solar generation located in nodes with not such high performance, but with available transmission capacity.