Vast Iberdrola solar park means more clean energy for Mexico

With 305 hectares (755 acres) turned into an endless landscape of solar panels, Iberdrola opens this December its first solar park in Mexico, with an installed capacity of 100 megawatts (MW), enough to provide electricity for 100,000 homes.

“This is the first plant of the kind we call grand solar - above 30 MW. And it reaffirms the company’s aim to provide renewable energy. Specifically, by means of solar photovoltaics,” the director of Iberdrola Renewables Mexico, Alfonso Campos, told EFE.

Located in the northern Mexican state of Sonora, this monumental photovoltaic park - with a surface equivalent to 32 baseball stadiums - has required an investment of $135 million.

Just a few days before starting operations, the Hermosillo solar plant covers a semidesert area next to the like-named city, and is yet another example of the potential for investment, energy and green action of Latin America’s second largest economy after Brazil.

Planning of the project began in 2016 and construction in March 2017.

The area saw the arrival over several months of 389,580 solar panels that were shipped from China by sea.

Unlike other energy plants like wind farms and combined cycle operations, the biggest challenge was logistical, above all because of the complexity of moving thousands and thousands of pieces to the destination site under a scorching sun with temperatures above 40 C (100 F).

“It was a beastly challenge and we had to face it every day for five months, when 10 to 12 containers full of both structures and panels would arrive,” the emplacement director of the project, Angel Pinilla, told EFE.

In its construction phase, the plant had some 750 workers, while 100 percent of the firms contracted were Mexican, as were 80 percent of the equipment and employees.

Despite the difficulties, the site could not be better: the region gets around 2,200 hours of solar radiation a year, a perfect place for generating energy.

Meanwhile, the impact on the environment was minimized with a plan to rescue and relocate more than 1,000 specimens of fauna of more than 50 different species, and more than 14 million pesos (some $690,000) were set aside for the Forestry Fund of the Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources (Semarnat).

Iberdrola estimates that with this solar park - which expects to help Mexico achieve its goal of generating 35 percent clean energy by 2024 - around 110,000 tons of carbon dioxide will be eliminated from the atmosphere annually, the equivalent of taking 30,000 vehicles off the road for a year.