Chile Solar Energy Development

With its excellent solar resources and a liberal electricity market, Chile has seen a rapid rise of PV power plants recently. JinkoSolar Holding Co. (JKS), a global leader in the solar PV industry, will be manufacturing and transporting 197,000 high efficiency PV Solar modules for the first of the two projects — the Lalackama PV 60-megawatt plant located in Chile's Atacama Desert region.
This stacks up pretty well against the energy industry norms though, even in traditional markets we see similar challenges and as we've seen in the inversores UK, even a national commitment to new nuclear power is fraught with political and practical challenges that threaten the delivery of projects.

Some experts believe that these merchant projects have to be careful to not make the same mistake that happened in Chile, as they run the risk of cannibalizing” themselves by producing large volumes of solar energy, leading to a reduction of the high wholesale power prices that projects strongly rely on and that are essential to the success of solar PV projects.
As the country's economy expands, Chile's energy requirement for 2015-2030 is forecast to grow in parallel at a rate of 72.98 per cent in the Central Interconnected System (SIC) and by 93.76 per cent in the Northern Interconnected System (SING) system.
Unlike the current PPA format, where a solar developer signs an agreement with a customer to purchase power from the solar plant at an agreed-upon price for several years (often fifteen or more), selling electricity on the wholesale power offers the possibility for market prices to fluctuate on an hourly basis.

With this system, we can make our fresh water consumption more efficient, in line with our goal of re-imagining mining and reducing Anglo American's fresh water consumption by 50 percent by 2030, as well as the CO2 emissions by producing non-polluting energy,” said Patricio Chacana, Los Bronces' vice president of operations.
The high-efficiency SunPower solar panels installed at the site will be cleaned using SunPower's proprietary robotic solar panel cleaning technology, which uses 75 percent less water than traditional cleaning methods and can help improve system performance by up to 15 percent.