Deals for Ecuador’s Villonaco III wind farm and El Aromo solar project are set to close in April (2024), IJGlobal has learnt from the sidelines of IJLatAm 2024 in Miami.

According to sources at the IJGlobal conference hosted this week in Florida, the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) will provide financing to both projects:

• El Aromo – $144 million, owned by Spanish developer Solarpack 
• Villonaco III – around $100 million, owned by Spain’s ACS

Located in the Manabí province, El Aromo has an installed capacity of 200MW and will generate 344 GWh of output annually. The project is Ecuador’s first privately-owned utility-scale solar project.

There are 9x 20-year PPAs already in place – all with state-owned electricity distributors. The price of electricity will be around $0.6/KWh. Solarpack won the 20-year concession to develop the project in an auction in 2020.

ACS – through its subsidiaries Cobra and Zero-E – won the 25-year concession to develop Villonaco in December 2020. The procurement process was delayed several times due to the Covid-19 pandemic.