As part of the agreement, Total Eren will sell the stake to Mitsui’s subsidiary MIT Argentina Generation. The wind farm is located in the Santa Cruz province in Southern Argentina and currently under construction.
This is first large scale wind project for the French renewables company, in the country, where it holds a total gross installed capacity of 180MW in renewable energy, both in operation and under construction.
The wind farm will include 27 of 3.6MW turbines and it will be built on a 350 hectare site near the city of Pico Truncado in Santa Cruz Province, located about 1,500 km southwest of Buenos Aires.
The clean electricity generated from the wind farm will be sold to Cammesa, the administration company for the wholesale electric power market in Argentina, under a 20-year agreement. The total cost of the project is $220m.
Mitusi stated that it will use its knowledge of the electric power business in Japan and other countries to ensure steady progress and smooth beginning of commercial operations of the project.
Power from the wind farm will be sufficient to power nearly 110,000 homes, while offsetting more than 200,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions annually.
Total Eren executive vice president and business development global head Fabienne Demol said: “I am very pleased to sign this agreement on our ‘Vientos Los Hercules’ project with such an experienced and established partner as Mitsui.
“Vientos Los Hercules represents our first large-scale wind power plant in both Argentina and Latin America, a strategic region where we have succeeded in building up a portfolio of 320MW of renewable energy assets in only five years.”
Finance for the project is being provided by KfW IPEX-Bank (Euler Hermes), the German development finance institution (DEG), and the Dutch development bank (FMO). The wind farm is expected to begin commercial operations in the middle of next year and it will generate nearly 400GWh of clean electricity per year.
