EDP acquires Soon Energy in Poland

  • ECO News
  • 31 March 2022

EDP Comercial wants to reinforce the growth achieved in decentralised solar energy: today it already has 800 MWp of capacity.

EDP Comercial wants to reinforce the growth already achieved in decentralised solar energy (in 2021 it doubled its installed capacity and reached 500 MW) and, to do so, it will move forward with the purchase of Soon Energy, in Poland. The acquisition will guarantee from the outset a total portfolio of 30 MW in the country.

In an interview with ECO, Vera Pinto Pereira, executive director of EDP Comercial, explained that the deal now announced (the value of which she did not reveal) is part of a “new trend, a new opportunity, of having distributed solar energy generation, in the sense that it takes place not in large plants but on the roof of houses, factories, taking the energy transition to families and companies”.

Forecasts show that if the renewable energy generation capacity in the world will grow in the next five years by about 60% (to over 4800 GW), about 20 to 25% of that growth will be through decentralised solar energy (about 1800 GW in 2026). The opportunity is there and EDP is already reaping the rewards.

“March 2022 was, in Portugal, the month that we, in EDP’s history, grew the most in distributed solar since ever. The average installation for Portuguese families is three solar panels, 1 KWp [KW peak], with an initial investment of around €2000,” the CEO reveals to ECO.

In Italy, EDP bought Enertel and, more recently, in Asia Pacific, Sunseap. In the Polish market, EDP entered 2020, with a commercial operation that has already achieved the first 5 MW of decentralised solar energy in the Eastern European country, to which are now added more than 25 MWp (MW peak) of Soon Energy’s solar portfolio, installed in business and residential clients in several regions of Poland (Warsaw, Lublin, near Ukraine, and Gdansk). Of these, 10 MWp were installed in 2021, a year in which the company now acquired had revenues of six million euros.

According to EDP’s expectations, the “synergies between both companies will allow the Portuguese electric company’s current presence in the Polish market to grow five times” by 2025. In Poland, EDP is also an electricity supplier and in 2021 supplied around 50 GWh of energy to business customers

The sale, construction and maintenance of decentralised solar installations is one of the growth axes of EDP’s strategic plan until 2025, which foresees investing 24 billion euros in energy transition and doubling wind and solar capacity (4 GW/year), of which over 10% will be in decentralised solar energy. In other words, this means growing, by 2025, more than 10 times what EDP had at the start of 2021, to 2.2 GW installed in the homes of families and in companies on a global scale.