Spain awards €360M to 1.14GW solar-plus-storage projects

The Spanish Ministry of Ecological Transition (MITECO) has awarded €360 million (US$415 million) to 1.14GW of solar PV co-located with battery energy storage system (BESS) projects.

Although the programme, called RENOINN 2, was open to other technologies co-located with BESS, solar PV accounted for nearly the entire volume awarded, 1.22GW. In total, the programme allocated €433 million in funding to 524 renewable energy projects co-located with BESS, of which 463 were co-located with solar PV.

On the BESS front, the programme awarded 2.3GWh of energy storage capacity, eight times the awarded capacity (351.6MWh) in the first iteration of the programme.

The goal of the programme was to support the development of innovative technologies, including agrivoltaics (agriPV) and floating solar (FPV) co-located with BESS.

In total, the RENOINN 2 programme awarded projects under five different lines, one for agricultural land, one for FPV, one for infrastructure, one for self-consumption and the last one for renewable heat pump installations.

AgriPV accounted for the majority of the solar PV projects awarded, with 882MW, while 1.7GWh of BESS was awarded under that category. These were divided into three sub-categories depending on the type of installation and the distance from the crop.

MITECO said that half of the agriPV projects awarded funding were on farms dedicated to cereals and tree crops such as olive groves and orchards, among others. For these projects, the solar PV panels will be mounted on a structure more than four meters high.

Most of the agriPV projects awarded will include a control plot to analyse the results and effects of solar PV panels with crops.

Moreover, a total of 29 FPV projects were awarded funding for a combined installed 46MW of solar PV and  51MWh BESS, while the solar self-consumption category had 70MW of combined solar PV capacity and 150MWh of BESS across 274 projects.

Similar to previous funding of renewable energy projects, both upstream and downstream, the funds will be provided through Spain’s recovery and resilience plan (PRTR) under NextGenEU

The full list of awarded projects can be accessed here.

Per region, Catalonia has been awarded the most solar PV across all five funding lines, with 322MW. It is followed by Castile and León with 208MW and the Valencian Community with 158MW, as shown in the chart below.

This story first appeared on PV Tech.