Located in the municipality of Santiago de Cacém, near Sines, the infrastructure will have an installed capacity of 1,200 megawatts (MW) and should become operational in 2025, allowing the creation of 2,500 jobs, “mostly performed by local workers”.

“The Fernando Pessoa power station, named after the poet, will provide enough clean, cheap, and locally produced energy to meet the annual needs of around 430,000 homes, a population equivalent to almost twice the size of the city of Porto”.

The installation, whose connection to the grid is already contracted with Rede Energética Nacional (REN), should avoid the consumption of 370 million cubic meters of gas per year, the volume needed to produce the same amount of energy in a combined cycle.

With regard to the protection of biodiversity, Iberdrola explains that the land could be used by local shepherds as “pasture for raising sheep and beehives will be introduced, which will contribute to improving the stability of ecosystems and increasing the yield of cultivation in the surrounding farmland”. In addition, plantations will be made in the area around the infrastructure to replace eucalyptus trees with native trees.

Iberdrola's Fernando Pessoa solar park is part of the €3 billion investment in wind and solar energy expected to be implemented in Portugal over the next few years.

“Fernando Pessoa's solar installation constitutes a new milestone in Europe by combining the ambitions of clean energy with the generation of positive and tangible environmental and social impacts”, said the president of Iberdrola, Ignacio Galán.