The European Investment Bank (EIB) is to advance a €50m ($55m) loan towards construction of a Spanish wind complex that will sell power to sportswear giant Nike.
The EIB finance will account for half the investment needed to build the 111MW Cavar project, a 50/50 joint venture (JV) between utility Iberdrola and Caja Rural de Navarra.
The remainder will be underpinned by a 15-year power purchase agreement (PPA) reached with Nike in Europe earlier this year.
Cavar is the first wind project in Spain to sell its energy to a large corporation. Around 40MW of the wind farm’s capacity will meet the power needs of Nike’s European facilities.
The wind complex – due to be fully operational by the end of 2020 at a site in Navarra – will use 32 Siemens Gamesa SG 3.4-132 that Iberdrola says are the largest deployed onshore in Spain so far.
Iberdrola Spain chief executive Angeles Santamaria highlighted “the importance of access to climate financing instruments in order the accelerate the energy transition we need”.
“Iberdrola is making progress with major investment into renewables in Spain, where we plan to install 3GW of new capacity by 2022 and up to 10GW by 2030.”
The announcement comes as Madrid prepares to host the COP25 UN climate summit, which starts next week
Amid domestic political deadlock that’s slowing policymaking, Spain’s renewables industry is hoping to see delayed climate and energy transition legislation brought forward early in 2020.
Government plans are for wind power capacity to be more than doubled from 23.5GW in 2018 to 50GW by 2030, and to kick-start a sevenfold increase in solar to 37GW, according to Spain’s far-reaching National Energy and Climate Plan submitted to the EU earlier this year.
The EIB, the EU's investment bank, said: “Spain has major renewable energy potential, and the EIB wants to help it to become a reference point in the sector by providing investments to promote the transition to a low-carbon economy while simultaneously fostering growth and employment.”
