Monday 20 January 2020

Europe’s ‘largest’ solar power plant completed by Iberdrola in Spain

The construction of what is claimed to be the largest solar power plant in Europe has been completed by Spanish utility Iberdrola.

The Núñez de Balboa plant in Spain consists of 1.4 million solar panels across 1,000 hectares in three municipalities of Extremadura and has a total capacity of 500MW.

The €300 million (£256m) facility is expected to create around 832GWh of electricity annually – enough to power around 250,000 homes.

It also helped create around 1,200 jobs and will avoid 215,000 tons of carbon emissions a year.

The project is part of Iberdrola’s plans to install more than 2GW of solar power in Extremadura by 2022.

Iberdrola has obtained its commissioning permit from the Ministry for Ecological Transition and for which the national grid has started tests for energisation.

Part of the project was funded by the European Investment Bank (EIB) and Spain’s state financial agency ICO.