MANILA, Philippines – The joint venture of AboitizPower and SunEdison Philippines Helios BV is launching its newly-completed 59-megawatt (MW) solar power project in Negros Occidental.
San Carlos Sun Power Inc. (SaCaSun) said the solar farm is now exporting power to the Visayas grid, ahead of before the Department of Energy’s (DOE) March 15 deadline to qualify for Feed-in Tariff (FIT) incentives.
It plans to conduct a formal inauguration of the solar project in April.
“We have successfully completed the project in San Carlos City, Negros Occidental and we are now exporting power into the Visayas grid,” SaCaSun president and COO Lino M. Bernardo said.
“We look forward to working with all of our stakeholders to further contribute to a cleaner energy future for Negros and for the Philippines as a whole,” he said.
Under the FIT scheme, power developers are entitled to a set of incentives for developing the more expensive renewable technology.
For solar, developers are given until March 15 to complete their projects and start producing electricity to the grid to be able to receive the FIT rate of P8.69 per kilowatt-hour (kWh).
SaCaSun said the plant is expected to generate more than 85 gigawatt hours of clean electricity a year, enough to power 27,600 homes.
This is estimated to help avoid the emission of more than 44,000 tons of carbon dioxide over 20 years – the equivalent of taking around 10,000 cars off the road.
The P4.9-billion solar project was funded with a mix of equity and a P3.7-billion debt from BDO Unibank Inc.
SaCaSun is AboitizPower’s first foray into solar power and is the first with SunEdison since both companies struck a deal in November 2014 to explore, develop, construct and operate up to 300 MW of utility-scale solar photovoltaic power generation projects in the Philippines over the next three years.