The auction was the first of its kind in Portugal that invited companies to lodge bids with a storage component included, with eight of the 12 batches awarded to solar-plus-storage projects.

Portugal’s second solar auction has closed with record-breaking low prices of €11.14/MWh (US$13.12), or US$0.0131/kWh, the country’s government announced yesterday.

In the past few months Spain has announced a 2.5GW energy storage target by 2030 and Portugal is hosting a solar tender with a significant add-on option for storage. Clean Horizon’s experts Corentin Baschet and Tanguy Poirot spoke with Andy Colthorpe on the role batteries and other storage can play in the Iberian Peninsula’s energy transition in the present and future.

An auction for 700MW of grid energy capacity in Portugal is being configured to allow bids from solar and also solar-plus-storage projects to participate on a competitive basis, with guaranteed payments for energy storage co-located projects to use a capping mechanism in the event of ‘price spikes’.

Portugal is already speeding up work to follow its record-breaking solar auction of 2019 with a fresh tender this year.

Portugal’s EDP has inked a deal for its largest PV project to date, a 3.8MWp solar-plus-storage duo it will develop for lead acid battery and storage system maker Exide Technologies.

Secretary of state João Galamba tells Energy-Storage.news of plans to boost dispatchable renewables as government works to drive a PV surge within a decade.