Iberdrola starts up the largest photovoltaic plant in Oregon

Iberdrola has just started commercial operation in the United States of the Pachwáywit Fields photovoltaic plant, the largest in the state of Oregon. Located in the county of Guilliam, the facility built by the company's subsidiary in this country, AVANGRID, has 205 megawatts (MW) of installed capacity. The more than 471,000 panels that make up the plant will be capable of generating energy equivalent to the consumption of 40,000 homes per year. 

The solar farm will supply clean, renewable energy to large Portland General Electric customers, including 17 of the utility's largest customers, through its Green Future Impact programme. This initiative aims to help businesses and municipalities in the state meet their sustainability and emissions reduction goals by supplying them with locally generated green electricity at an affordable price.  

During construction, the project has created 300 jobs, many of them local. In addition, it has already contributed close to 1.4 million dollars through local taxes and land leases, which have allowed the implementation of actions to benefit local communities in the areas of housing, children, communications, and art and culture, among other initiatives. 

The start-up of Pachwáywit Fields has made Gilliam County the largest producer of renewable wind and solar energy in the state of Oregon. Other renewable facilities in the area include Iberdrola's 200 MW Montague wind farm, which powers Apple's Oregon data centre. 

Regulatory stability and the commitment of the different administrations to decarbonisation have helped Iberdrola to strengthen its commitment to the United States, the main destination for the group's investments, with more than 21.5 billion dollars planned for the three-year period 2023-2025.

In less than two decades, Iberdrola has become one of the largest groups in the North American electricity sector, listed on the New York Stock Exchange since 2015.  

Headquartered in Orange, Connecticut, and with approximately $40 billion in assets, the group's US subsidiary, Avangrid, is present in 24 states and manages more than 9,450 MW of installed capacity, of which more than 8,600 MW of renewables (mainly wind and solar PV), and more than 130,000 kilometres of power lines through eight distributors in New York, Connecticut, Maine and Massachusetts. The company serves a population of 10 million people in the United States.  

The subsidiary has more than 7,500 employees and generates through its investments and purchases a total of 70,000 jobs in the country.  

The combination of grid business and renewable energy generation is one of the company's key differentiators.   

In the transmission and distribution grids business, it is investing in modernisation and digitalisation, with the aim of increasing the quality of service and resilience to extreme weather events and enabling the integration of more clean energy into the system.  

In renewable energies, the company is the third largest in the United States in terms of installed capacity and leads the development of offshore wind energy, with a project portfolio of more than 6,000 MW. In addition, its installed renewable capacity in the country is expected to reach approximately 10,000 MW by 2025, with a 70% growth in a decade. 

It currently has two of the country's most important renewable energy and grid initiatives underway: the construction of the Vineyard Wind 1 offshore wind farm, with a capacity of 806 MW, in the waters off Massachusetts, and the acquisition of PNM Resources, in New Mexico and Texas.  

In early 2022, Iberdrola, through Avangrid, was awarded more than 2,000 MW of offshore wind capacity on the east coast: the Park City Wind (804 MW) and Commonwealth Wind (1,232 MW) offshore wind farms that have ongoing Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) permits. Total investment in these three projects could exceed $10 billion over the current decade, and would generate clean energy for more than 1.5 million homes.  

It also has the Kitty Hawk project (3,500 MW), in North Carolina waters, whose first phase, Kitty Hawk North (800 MW) has already begun the BOEM permitting process. 

In line with the US government's commitment to green hydrogen, in October 2022, Iberdrola and the US company Sempra Infrastructure announced an agreement for the joint development of large-scale green hydrogen and ammonia projects to meet the decarbonisation needs of US industry.