Solar Philippines offers to contract 10-GW solar farm developments

MANILA, Philippines — Solar Philippines has submitted offtake proposals to substantially contract its 10 gigawatts (GW) of solar farm developments eyed for completion in three years.

In a statement yesterday, Solar Philippines said the offers are pending the approval of off-takers and regulators.

This comes a month after it announced that it was preparing to meet the requirements of potential off-takers.

SPNEC aims to complete the development of 10-GW of solar projects by 2025, which would help address the country’s potential power shortage.

This would also represent a significant increase from the country’s grid-connected solar capacity of 1,127.3 megawatts (MW) as of December 2021, based on government data.

“While we have been constrained from commenting on our projects due to ongoing contracting processes, we look forward to share more details in the coming days, and to give a better picture of what SPNEC will look like after the asset-for-share swap,” Solar Philippines founder Leandro Leviste said.

If approved, these projects would potentially have nine terawatt-hours (TWh) per year of contracted energy, which would serve as a critical mass of demand enabling 10 GW of developments scheduled to commence operations mostly between 2025 to 2026.

Aside from the planned 500-megawatt (MW) Nueva Ecija solar farm of Solar Philippines Nueva Ecija Corp. (SPNEC), these developments are held by companies with shares subject to the asset-for-share swap between SPNEC and Solar Philippines.

The largest of these solar developments is Terra Solar Philippines Inc., a joint venture with Prime Infrastructure Holdings Inc. of tycoon Enrique Razon, touted to be the world’s largest solar project and would be more than twice the total capacity of solar operating in the country.

The joint venture plans to construct 3.5-GW of solar and 4.5-GWh of battery storage to supply Manila Electric Co. (Meralco) 850 MW from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m., on a firm basis like a conventional mid-merit power plant.

Other units include Solar Philippines Batangas Baseload Corp., which is developing up to two-GW solar project with battery storage; Solar Philippines Central Luzon Corp., a joint venture with AC Energy; Solar Philippines South Luzon Corp.; and Solar Philippines Visayas Corp.

These are among other units in the published list of qualified bidders of the Department of Energy (DOE) for the Green Energy Auction Program (GEAP).

These are in addition to earlier projects of Solar Philippines, which include 63 MW operating under Solar Philippines Calatagan Corp., a joint venture with Korea Electric Power Corp.; and 100 MW operating plus expansions under Solar Philippines Tarlac Corp. and Solar Philippines Tanauan Corp., which are also joint ventures with Prime Infrastructure with Meralco power supply agreements (PSAs).

Solar Philippines was founded in 2013 to accelerate the adoption of solar energy in the Philippines.

In 2020, it bared its plan to construct over one GW of solar projects in the provinces of Batangas, Cavite, Nueva Ecija, and Tarlac this year.

It is currently conducting an asset-for-share swap with SPNEC, where in the latter would acquire the former’s assets, with SPNEC Parent subscribing to 24,373,050,000 shares of SPNEC at P2.50 per share for a total value of P60.93 billon.