Renewable

July 22 (Renewables Now) - Round 3 of the Argentine RenovAr renewable energy auction, due to be held today, could be postponed due to complaints from two rejected bidders, local energy portal Energia Estrategica reported Monday.

A total of 52 projects for 323.5 MW of new capacity were cleared to participate in Round 3, also known as MiniRen, due to its focus on smaller schemes that will connect to medium- and low-voltage networks.

After envelopes containing economic offers were opened last week, two food producers, Ledesma SAAI (BCBA:LEDE) and Ingenio San Isidro y Destileria, filed complaints arguing that their biomass projects were arbitrarily disqualified for not being new power plants. Both companies claim that their projects, the 7-MW Ledesma Bioenergia and the 10-MW Ingenio San Isidro, are new and planned for construction if they win an off-take contract in the auction, Energia Estrategica wrote.

Ingenio San Isidro offered the lowest price, USD 104.5 (EUR 93.9) per MWh, in the biomass category. The offer from Ledesma came with the highest price for biomass, USD 107 per MWh, according to the energy portal.

Apart from these two, one landfill biomass and one small hydro project were disqualified from the next round.

Wind and solar power schemes presented the most competitive offers at last week’s envelope opening. The average price for wind was USD 58.2/MWh, while the lowest was USD 52.5/MWh. The price for solar averaged USD 57.9/MWh with the lowest being USD 54.2/MWh.

(USD 1.0 = EUR 0.89)