Exploring Argentina’s Diverse Energy Resources: A Focus on Solar Energy and Renewable Development

Argentina is a land of abundant energy resources, both conventional and renewable. This chapter provides an overview of Argentina’s energy landscape with a focus on its solar energy potential, both Photovoltaic and Thermal. The country’s location and high solar radiation levels give it a solar energy potential of around 3.5 million GWh/year. As of 2022, the installed solar power capacity in Argentina exceeds 1 GW (Argentina – Countries & Regions, IEA. Accessed: May 15, 2023. [Online]. Available: https://www.iea.org/countries/argentina ), expected to increase to 2.2 GW by 2025. Several large-scale solar projects are underway in Argentina, such as the Caucharí Solar Park and Villanueva Solar Park, which have a capacity of 300 MW and 640 MW, respectively. Argentina has well-established human resources, a key engine of the transition as well as many years of experience with PV projects ranging from satellite power to remote community solar. Although solar energy represents a small fraction of Argentina’s energy mix, private-public initiatives are beginning to tap into this potential to meet the country’s growing energy demand and reduce its carbon footprint. Argentina has been implementing policies and incentives to encourage the development of the solar industry, including the RenovAr program that awarded contracts for 2.4 GW of renewable energy projects, of which around 1.2 GW are solar. Additionally, in 2017, Argentina introduced law 27.424 to regulate distributed on-grid generation. Individual provinces such as Cordoba have passed legislation facilitating distributed energy installations, which have begun to grow steadily. Despite these developments, renewable energies were still approximately 15% of total generation in 2022 and challenges to a timely transition to a largely renewable energy matrix are substantial.