At the RE-Source conference this week in Amsterdam, RE-Source Platform Policy and Impact Director Annie Scanlan projected record corporate power purchase agreement (PPA) growth in Europe for 2024. Corporate PPA capacity has already reached 10.7 GW this year, nearing last year’s record of 10.8 GW.
At yesterday’s opening session of this year’s RE-Source conference in Amsterdam, Annie Scanlan, policy and impact director of the RE-Source Platform, provided an upbeat assessment of corporate PPA growth in Europe. After reaching 10.8 GW of contracted capacity in 2023, corporate PPAs of the renewable energy kind are set to eclipse last year’s record. Scanlan revealed that contracted PPA capacity is already at 10.7 GW in 2024 if all renewable corporate PPAs are counted from the beginning of this year to the beginning of the RE-Source conference on Oct. 24. Since most of Q4 still lies ahead of us, 2024 should be another record year for renewable corporate PPAs in Europe.
The annual RE-Source conference has become a popular event for generators and sellers of renewable electricity to meet corporate and industrial buyers and their advisors. According to Walburga Hemetsberger, CEO of SolarPower Europe, who opened the conference yesterday with Malgosia Bartosik, deputy CEO of WindEurope, over 1,400 attendees convened in Amsterdam to discuss the state of the PPA market and meet with potential PPA counterparties. Like the contracted capacity in 2024, the number of attendees was record-breaking and the beautiful former stock exchange building Beurs van Berlage provided an apt setting to bring together buyers and sellers of renewable electricity.
Looking at the latest capacity numbers for 2024, solar again took the top spot with most of the contracted capacity this year. What stands out this year is the growth in hybrid PPAs involving both solar and wind. While minuscule last year, such hybrid PPAs achieved a record high this year, climbing well above 1 GW of contracted capacity. Wind power PPAs continue to struggle due to long permitting cycles. As Bruce Douglas, CEO of the Global Renewables Alliance, pointed out at RE-Source yesterday, it cannot be that the permitting of wind farms takes longer than the time to build them.
Overall renewable corporate PPA capacity stands at 47.6 GW currently after taking into account the 10.7 GW contracted to date this year and the 10.8 GW contracted last year. Both years marked a big jump over the previous years with 7.8 GW contracted in 2021 and only 6.9 GW contracted in 2022. The robust growth of the renewable corporate PPA market in Europe becomes clear if the recent numbers are compared to 2020 and previous years, when this market was markedly smaller (2.1 GW in 2018, 2.7 GW in 2019 and 3.1 GW in 2020).
But the corporate PPA market is still in the formative phase, with some European markets showing little or no activity and certain corporate sectors still underrepresented in the statistics. Spain continues to be the corporate PPA leader with 11 GW contracted to date, with Germany in second place with 6.7 GW. Sweden (4.6 GW) and the United Kingdom (4.3 GW) are next in line, but PV PPAs are less prominent in these two countries than in Spain and Germany. In 2024 France has overtaken the Netherlands with 3.3 GW, compared to 2.9 GW in Holland. While wind dominates in the Netherlands, solar PV takes the lion’s share in France.
Turning to the individual sectors, information and communications technology (ICT) and heavy industry dominate corporate renewable energy procurement, with ICT leading the way with 14.9 GW contracted to date. While both of these sectors have each achieved cumulative contracted capacity in the range of 12 GW to 15 GW, all the other sectors are far below this level at under 3.5 GW.
Renewable CPPAs play a pivotal role in decarbonizing European industry and the corporate sector and making this tool available to small- and medium-sized buyers is key to driving the adoption of clean energy in Europe and achieving the ambitious renewable energy goals and climate goals Europe has set for itself.
Eckhart K. Gouras
This content is protected by copyright and may not be reused. If you want to cooperate with us and would like to reuse some of our content, please contact: [email protected].
Popular content
