The customer is Atacama Minerals, with the off-grid PV array slated to provide electricity to its Aguas Blancas iodine mine in northern Chile by spring 2014.
Etrion will build, own and operate the project with the intention of signing a long-term power purchase agreement with the miner by the end of March, once the financing is in place.
Etrion says the project will cost no more than $20m, some of which will come from non-recourse project finance, and the rest off its own balance sheet.
Etrion – based in Geneva and publicly listed in Canada and Sweden – owns some 60MW of ground-mounted, feed-in tariff-eligible PV capacity across 17 arrays in Italy.
