Bidders line up for Ecuador renewables auction

Ecuador’s Ministry of Energy and Non-Renewable Natural Resources has announced 22 companies were pre-qualified to participate in a renewables auction launched at the end of July.

Companies from Italy, France, Spain, the United Kingdom, Canada, China, the United States, Portugal, Colombia and Germany now have until November 13 to provide further documentation relating to their bids.

The auction will allocate capacity at the 200 MW El Aromo solar project in the province of Manabí plus two dozen small solar, wind and hydroelectric projects with an aggregate 200 MW of further capacity. In terms of large scale wind power, the exercise will also allocate capacity at the 46 MW Villonaco II project and the 56 MW Villonaco III facility, in Loja province. “There will also be a separate round for the Galapagos Islands with small projects and storage,” said Carlos St. James, a director of the Latin American & Caribbean Council on Renewable Energy, in July.

Hold-ups

The ministry, which had delayed Monday’s deadline for the delivery of pre-qualification documents a month, has pushed back the announcement of the results of the procurement almost seven weeks, from February 28 to April 15.

The off-taker of the renewable energy generated by all the projects will be the state-owned Corporación Eléctrica de Ecuador SA. The El Aromo solar project will be awarded a 20-year power purchase agreement and the wind projects will land 25-year deals.

Under the terms of the exercise, the projects will be built and operated by private developers for a period of time before ultimately being transferred to state ownership.

International Renewable Energy Agency statistics indicate Ecuador had only 26 MW of solar generation capacity at the end of last year, most of it in the form of a 20 MW facility developed in 2014.