Colombia has published the draft version of its 10-year PPA for public consultation over the next 12 days in preparation for the country’s first long-term renewable energy tender on 2 January 2019, according to an official schedule released by the energy ministry.

The draft contract entered public consultation as the new mines and energy minister Maria Fernanda Suárez reaffirmed her stance in favour of diversification of Colombia’s power mix from the current 70% hydro and 30% fossil fuel. The new Iván Duque administration – which was sworn-in in August – has said it wants 1.5GW of renewables in four years.

“Our job as government is to ensure that Colombia is capable of facing the energy transition in an adequate manner […] the decision isn’t dependent renewable or non-renewable generation, we will, without doubt, need all technologies,” she said.

The long-awaited tender will contract hydro, wind, PV, biomass and geothermal projects. Colombia is the third-largest economy in Latin America but is the last to start holding tenders for new renewable capacity. Despite wind power generation potential topping 20GW and solar PV potential of 40GW, Colombia currently has under 20MW of wind installed and an insignificant volume of solar.

According to the proposed contract, the 10-year PPA will be denominated in Colombian pesos and corrected to local inflation. A decree published in August said the government plans to procure 3.4TWh/yr of electric power from various technologies over a decade from 1 December 2022, when the bid winners are required to start delivering the power to the grid.

This will represent about 4.4% of the projected demand in 2022, said the country’s energy planning authority UPME.

The government also published draft guidelines for the qualification of the projects. They detail broad criteria which put low CO2 emissions, supply security, complementarity to hydro power sources and technology diversification as priorities.

The government also said that it will require 20 years of wind and solar irradiation measurements for the qualification of projects.

For wind, the measurement of speeds must be made at 80 metres. If on-site measurement data is not available for the 20 years, bidders can use secondary sources to estimate wind speeds such as those compiled by the US’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), NASA’s MERRA and wind resource maps elaborated by AWS Truepower among others.

According to the tender schedule, the rules will be published in early October, the qualified bidders will be announced by mid-December and the PPAs are expected to be signed on 14 January.

With some 2GW of tender-ready wind power projects, the local renewable association SER Colombia expects around 700MW of renewables of all technologies to be contracted in this first tender, which could turn Colombia into a 500MW a year renewable energy market.

Transition

Colombia releases draft PPA as tender plans advance