Construction is expected to begin in 2018 and take approximately three years.
Diego Biasi, chief executive of Quercus, which has a track record of investing in renewable energy, told Reuters the firm had decided to go for such a big project to get an endorsement from Iran’s Ministry of Energy.
“This is a project of national interest, so we got special support. We had enough investors interested so instead of splitting that across smaller projects which wouldn’t have given us the same relationship with the Ministry, we decided to go for one,” he said in a phone interview on Tuesday.
To date, Iran has 63 MW of installed solar capacity, chiefly in the cities of Yazd, Kerman, Isfahan and Hamadan. The government is taking steps to bolster the renewable energy market, including an objective to install 5 GW of new renewable energy capacity by 2020, accounting for 5% of generation.
