Alqueva Floating Solar & Storage

The Challenge

Portugal's solar build-out has been rapid but land-hungry, and the Alentejo's strongest grid connections were already committed to the hydro plants built a generation earlier. New ground-mounted capacity meant new land take, new permitting and new transmission, in a region where water, not sunlight, is the scarce resource.

Our Approach

We invested as a minority financial partner alongside a Portuguese utility and a European infrastructure fund, backing a floating array anchored on the reservoir itself and structured around the existing hydro concession: the panels share the dam's grid connection, and battery storage lets the two generation sources trade the same interconnection across the day.

Impact

The array reached full commercial operation within eighteen months of financial close, generating alongside the hydro plant through the same substation. The floating platform shades a fraction of the reservoir's surface, measurably reducing evaporation over the panels, in a basin where every retained cubic metre matters to the irrigation systems downstream.

Future Outlook

We hold an option to participate in the reservoir's later phases and are watching the evaporation and yield data closely. If the hybrid model performs through a full drought cycle, we expect it to travel well to other Iberian reservoirs, and we intend to still be invested when that happens.