Super-Size Solar Farms Are Taking Over the World
As costs come down, developers are going for even more scale–like 550 football fields of scale.
All of a sudden, solar energy is huge.
As many of the world’s major governments and corporations move to transition the global power supply away from fossil fuels, developers are transforming swaths of empty desert, agricultural land, and rural lakefront into vast solar energy farms. The mega-sized projects represent a new class of renewable power capacity that’s finally approaching the scale of coal-, oil-, and natural gas-fired plants.
Solar Scale
New solar projects over 200 megawatts have surged recently
Source: BloombergNEF
Large-scale solar projects are getting more common every year. In 2019, developers set a record by commissioning at least 35 projects of at least 200 megawatts worldwide, up about 17% from the year prior, according to an analysis of data compiled by BloombergNEF. With about 3,000 solar panels needed for each megawatt of capacity, a 200-megawatt project would be at least as big as 550 American football fields.
The increasing size of solar farms comes as costs fall. At the same time, there’s a growing group of buyers in the market for renewable assets, particularly pension funds and other institutional investors keen to match their long-dated liabilities with the consistent returns of solar farms.
Mexico: Magdalena II A subsidiary of the Italian energy company Enel SpA built this $165 million solar plant in the Mexican state of Tlaxcala. It’s made up of about 550,000 solar panels with a total capacity of 220 megawatts.
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“These guys won’t get out of bed for anything below 100 million euros,” says Pietro Radoia, a solar analyst at BNEF. “The bigger, the better.”
Solar farms were tiny in the U.S. before the early part of the last decade. Several developed in that time period benefited from loans or loan guarantees granted by the U.S. Energy Department under former President Barack Obama. Even so, they had to charge higher than average rates for power. Massive projects soon became rarer.
But as equipment got cheaper, competition increased for long-term power-supply contracts with utilities, driving down electricity prices. Prices for the panels themselves have fallen about 88% in the last decade and are expected to fall another 43% by 2030, according to BNEF. That has put a premium on scale.
The rise of the mega-solar parks hasn’t been universally celebrated. Homeowners have resisted living near green projects, worried about aesthetics and property values. It’s a conundrum for renewables: people want cleaner electricity, but they don't want it next door.
Still, developers are more confident building large projects “because they can deliver for a lower cost of energy,” says Chris Archer, head of green energy Americas at Macquarie Capital. “The simple answer is economics.”
Vietnam: Dau Tieng 1 and 2 This 420-megawatt project is one of the largest solar farms in Southeast Asia, taking up nearly two square miles.
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Smaller projects can be challenging to build. The costs for transmission lines, substation design, security, land, and fences is comparable for large and small projects, says Tom Buttgenbach, president and chief executive officer of 8minute Solar Energy, a California-based developer of large solar farms. That means bigger projects can use scale to drive down the price developers are able charge for electricity.
“The economics are just brutal on a small plant these days,” Buttgenbach says.
Those drivers are just as true in markets around the world, which has led to mega projects in places such as China, Egypt, and Spain.
Egypt: Benban The Benban solar park is the largest in Africa, and one of the largest in the world. The 1.5-gigawatt project will provide enough electricity for over 1 million homes.
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In some emerging markets, legal costs are relatively steady regardless of the size of the project. That’s helped lead investors to develop mega projects such as the Benban solar farm in southern Egypt which, at 1.5 gigawatts in size, has more capacity than many nuclear power plants.
“Now that people see renewables as cheap, they buy a lot of it,” says Harry Boyd-Carpenter, head of energy for Europe, the Middle East and Africa at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which helped finance the Egyptian solar project. “Without doing large solar and wind projects, we won’t achieve the energy transition.”