Argentina has signed the final 161MW of PPAs from the first stage of last year’s Round 2 RenovAr tender, including the last two successful wind projects.

The two wind developments are the 99MW Cañada León, owned by YPF Luz, and the 60MW General Acha wind farm, controlled by Latinoamericana Energia. The other projects that signed contracts were two small biogas and one small hydro plant adding up to 2.5MW.

All Round 2 wind projects – adding up to 990MW – are now signed, but the government has said that there are several other projects adding up to some 73MW that still haven’t finalised the 20-year, US dollar-indexed PPAs.

Although the Round 2 tender was held about a year ago, the Argentine government has extended the deadline for signing PPAs twice. The last deadline extension for Stage 1 occurred in early October, to November 23, but no more are expected.

“The government will start to execute the guarantees of the projects that didn’t sign PPAs within the announced deadlines. The aim is to make the [transmission] capacity available for the non-regulated market (MaTER),” the government said in a statement.

Argentina has been facing a transmission grid bottleneck after contracting around 5GW of new renewable capacity in two tender rounds, while an additional 1GW of new renewables has been lined up in the non-regulated market. The grid restrictions have led the government to hold a mini renewable energy tender this year. With 400MW of total capacity to be contracted, the tender will only accept projects up to 10MW so they can be connected to the low-voltage grid.

This is a contrast to the high demand registered in previous round. There is more than 10GW-worth of tender-ready projects in Argentina.

Round 2 was held in two stages because it was, like Round 1, heavily over-subscribed. In the first stage of Round 2, a total of 66 projects totalling 1.4GW were contracted and another 22 projects with 600MW were contracted in the second stage.

A total of 1.3GW of the Stage 1 projects have signed their PPAs, including all 665MW of wind.

Stage 2 has a slightly later deadline, until mid December, but all the four wind projects contracted in this stage – which add up to 327MW – have already signed their PPAs. The remaining unsigned projects are of other technologies.

Local press has reported that the several of the Stage 2 projects, adding up to to about 200MW – including over 180MW of solar PV – may have their contracts cancelled and lose their guarantees.

Consultants have told Recharge that some of the projects faced difficulties in raising financing because of the current financial troubles faced by the country, or because they weren’t fully or properly developed.