EDP Renovaveis, the world's fourth-largest renewable power producer, has brought on-stream the first hybrid wind-solar farm in Iberia, adding 36.5 gigawatts (GW) of annual capacity just as Europe is facing an energy crisis. The Mina de Orgueirel plant, about 300 km (186 miles) northeast of Portugal's capital Lisbon, combines 17,000 new photovoltaic panels covering an area of roughly six soccer pitches with wind turbines that EDPR already had on the same plot.
Singapore-based renewables firm EDPR Sunseap is eyeing north Asian economies as well as Vietnam and Australia to expand its utility-scale growth capacity, said a company executive on Wednesday. "Today our utilities strategy is heavily focused on Vietnam, China, South Korea, Japan and potentially Australia if we can find the opportunities to get in," said Pedro Vasconcelos, executive chairman of EDPR Sunseap.
Portugal's main utility EDP will scale up its offshore floating solar farms in Southeast Asia, hoping to get a big slice of the 16 gigawatts of photovoltaic power the region is expected to install on rivers and seas by 2030. CEO Miguel Stilwell said on Friday the first of these farms, with a capacity of 5 megawatts, launched last year in Singapore by its unit Sunseap, Southeast Asia's fourth-largest solar operator, showed "positive and encouraging results". "EDP sees this new technology as a good trigger for its expansion in Southeast Asia, and is already evaluating and developing other projects there," Stilwell told Reuters on the sidelines of the U.N. Ocean Conference in Lisbon.