European firm to invest $200 million in Ilocos wind power project

MANILA, Philippines - European power firm UPC-Asia Corp. is investing up to $200 million for an 80 megawatt (MW) wind power project in Pagudpud, Ilocos Norte, a top company official said.

Troels Carstensen, managing director for the Philippines, said they hope to finalize the financing requirement for the project before the end of the year.

He said they are now in talks with several local and international financial institutions to raise the funds for the project.

“We have had several meetings with Development Bank of the Philippines and Land Bank of the Philippines as well as PhilExim for guarantee purposes,” he said.

“We are presently talking to a few of the main banks in the Philippines. We sensed that there’s big appetite for financing renewable projects by the local banks,” he added.

According to the UPC-Asia official, they will assess the outcome of the first phase of the wind farm project and will decide later if they will expand the capacity to 120 MW.

“We had decided to concentrate on the first 80 MW. With the new law, I think everybody is eager to test the law. One thing is to see the law is in place, the other is we want to test it as we go along and see whether all incentives being stipulated in the law are good for our project,” he said.

Carstensen acknowledged the efforts of the Department of Energy (DOE) to facilitate RE development in the country.

“The cost is heavy but the DOE acted quite fast. The law came into place by December last year and within the timeframe they were able to come up with the IRR (implementing rules and regulations) within the  six months promised in the law,” he said.

He said they are currently conducting studies on 28 different locations in Luzon as potential sites for future wind power projects.

“We have other development projects in the pipeline and they will mature a little later. We are operating 28 wind masts so we are measuring wind on 28 other locations, all in Luzon,” he said.

If everything proceed on schedule, he said they would be able to connect their first wind farm project to the grid between the second and third quarter of 2011.

UPC-Asia established a representative office in the Philippine under the UPC-Asia Management LLC. It was formed by principals of UPC Group, one of Europe’s largest and most successful wind farm developers, to pursue projects in Asia. 

To date, the UPC Group has installed and operates over 650 MW of large-scale wind turbine generators in southern Italy and the island of Sardinia. 

UPC-Asia is also pursuing the development of several thousand megawatts of wind energy projects in Asia.