Date Published: 15/04/2021
ARCHIVED - Chinese state-owned company presents Mazarrón solar power plant; its fourth plant in the Murcia region
ARCHIVED ARTICLE
China Three Gorges continues to invest in the sunshine of the Costa Cálida
The China Three Gorges Corporation, a Chinese state-owned company which was behind the construction of the largest hydroelectric power plant in the world (the Three Gorges Dam project), is continuing to invest in the sunshine of the Region of Murcia by acquiring solar power plants, and on Wednesday officially presented the Pinilla Nexus plant on the boundary between Mazarrón and Fuente Álamo and close to the Camposol Urbanisation.
The majority of of CTG’s assets are in China, but the company has been developing wind and solar power operations all over the world in recent years and now has interests in 47 countries. Its Spanish subsidiary was created last year, and in the Region of Murcia the “X-Elio” corporation owns four solar power plants in Calasparra, Abanilla, Fuente Álamo and Mazarrón, where local dignitaries from the Town Hall were given a tour of the facility on Wednesday.
The “Pinilla Nexus” plant in Mazarrón, built recently at an investment cost of 35 million euros, consists of 129,000 solar panels alongside the RM-E17 road in the area of Las Coronadas, occupying a plot of over 86 hectares (76 in Mazarrón and the other 10 in Fuente Álamo) and achieving a reduction of carbon dioxide emissions which amounts to almost 66,000 tons per year. It is reported to have resulted in the creation of around a dozen jobs, although at the peak of construction activity around 400 people were working to make it operational.
The amount of electricity generated is sufficient to supply as many as 25,000 homes, representing a considerable contribution to the efforts being made by the Ministry for Ecological Transition to make the country’s energy supply more sustainable.
Ignacio Herrero of CTG adds that the company is considering more projects in the Region of Murcia, where the 50 megawatts of Pinilla Nexus are complemented by 182 more at other three plants, as well as in Portugal, Italy, the UK, Germany and Greece. However, some of their proposals in Murcia have met with opposition from conservations and ornithologists due to concerns over the land to be occupied, and at a plant in Lorca the design of the project had to be altered in order to pacify the protesters and safeguard the tiny population of the little bustard bird species which lives there.