Finnish investor Korkia to strengthen its position in Chile - partners with Ciudad Luz to kickstart new project development in Latin America
Finnish renewable energy investor Korkia and Chilean developer Ciudad Luz have established a joint venture to develop 500MW of solar, wind and hybrid projects in Chile over the course of four years. The projects will also include energy storage to help provide more reliability to the Chilean grid.
The plans for the cooperation include solar, wind, hybrid and storage projectsin both utility-scale as well as PMGDs. The projects will be developed across Chile in locations suitable for the deployment of new NCRE projects and the technology will be carefully selected in order to contribute to greater flexibility and security of Chile’s National Electric System (SEN). When completed, the projects will generate around 1300GWh of energy per year, which is enough to supply around 350.000 households.
“This is the first joint venture with a developer that Korkia closes in Latin America. We are happy to partner up with Ciudad Luz who is not only experienced and well-established in its home market Chile, but also invested in driving the energy transition,“ says Mikko Kantero, EVP of New Markets & Origination in Korkia.
Korkia has been operating in Chile since 2019, but earlier the company’s focus has been in the later stages of energy investing; the asset management of existing PV plants. So, for Korkia this cooperation marks the beginning of project development focused investing in Chile. What is also new about the projects is that, in addition to solar energy, the JV will include wind power and hybrid projects.
“Latin America is very attractive for renewable energy investing. As Ciudad Luz also operates in Colombia, this cooperation opens the possibility of expanding the JV also to the Colombian market in the nearby future. We both have ambition to create more clean megawatts to the continent in the following years,” Kantero continues.
PMGD refers to Small Distributed Generation Means (in Spanish, Pequeños Medios de Generación Distribuida). These projects have an installed capacity of up to 9MW and are connected to the distribution networks. Utility scale projects, in turn, connect to transmission lines and are not limited in size by regulations.
Korkia and Ciudad Luz’s planned PMGDs are projects combining solar and storage. In the utility scale segment, plans include wind, solar and hybrid projects with an installed capacity of up to 100MW. Also, standalone storage projects will be considered as possible development opportunities. The first projects are expected to reach the ready-to-build stage in three years.
“Chile is facing difficulties in its renewable and non-conventional energy sector because of a lack of transmission lines and high curtailment especially in solar projects. Currently the energy production capacity cannot be fully utilized to the maximum because the energy cannot be transferred to where it is needed at any given time. The storage projects with Korkia will allow us to combat this issue and hopefully provide more reliability to the grid,“ comments Tomás Steinacker, General Manager at Ciudad Luz.
Additional information:
Mikko Kantero
EVP, New Markets & Origination, Korkia
+358502247
mikko.kantero@korkia.fi
Tomás Steinacker
Managing Director, Ciudad Luz
+56 99 5358887
tsteinacker@ciudadluz.cl
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