Engie secures financing for 150-MW solar project in South Africa

SOUTH AFRICA – French power utility Engie SA has successfully reached financial and commercial close for two 75-megawatt solar projects in South Africa.

These projects, Grootspruit PV in the Free State province and Graspan Solar PV in the Northern Cape, are part of the country’s Renewable Energy Independent Power Producer Procurement Programme (REIPPPP) Bid Window Five (BW5), developed in collaboration with Pele Green Energy.

Engie finalized power purchase and implementation agreements with local utility Eskom and South Africa’s Department of Mineral Resources and Energy about a year ago.

Construction for these projects is slated to commence early next year, with an anticipated completion by the end of 2025.

In South Africa, Engie presently operates the 100-megawatt Xina Solar One and 100-megawatt Kathu Solar Park Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) plants in Pofadder and Kathu, along with the 94-megawatt West Coast 1 wind farm and the combined 21-megawatt Aurora and Vredendal solar photovoltaic (PV) parks.

ENGIE to bring 100MW of battery storage capacity to Scotland

Separately, Engie has inked a deal with Canadian Solar’s e-Storage to build two 50-megawatt/100-megawatt-hour, two-hour duration battery sites in Scotland.

The sites will be in Cathkin (south of Glasgow) and Broxburn (west of Edinburgh), set to commence construction in Q1 of next year, aiming for full operation by Q1 2023, with connection to SP Energy Network’s 33kV distribution network.

These endeavors contribute toward Engie’s global ambition of achieving a 10-gigawatt battery storage capacity.

Aidan Connolly, head of battery storage UK at Engie, expressed anticipation for collaborating with Canadian Solar on this project, having signed energy performance certificate (EPC) contracts for both sites.

This development comes shortly after Engie won its fight against an EU order to pay €120 million (US$130 million) in back taxes to Luxembourg, a blow to the European Commission’s crackdown on sweetheart deals between EU nations and multinationals.

The Commission, which is also the EU competition watchdog, in a 2018 decision said the French utility’s tax deal that treated the same transaction as both debt, which can be deducted from a tax bill, and equity, which is not subject to tax, artificially reduced its tax bill.

It said that the arrangement with Luxembourg led to Engie paying as little as 0.3% tax on certain profits in the Grand Duchy for a decade. A lower tribunal upheld the Commission’s decision in 2021. But the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) disagreed with the tribunal.

“The European Commission’s review of the tax rulings granted by Luxembourg to the Engie group infringed EU law,” the CJEU said.

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