EPI seen to hit half of RE goal by 2025

EMERGING POWER, Inc. (EPI), the renewable energy subsidiary of Nickel Asia Corp. (NAC), is projected to achieve half of its goal of developing one gigawatt (GW) of renewable energy (RE) projects by 2025, a company official said.

“By next year, we would have reached already half of our goal,” Andre Mikael Lu Dy, NAC’s vice-president for treasury and investor relations and sales, said at a recent briefing.

“Half a gigawatt is what we’ll be operating by 2025, [and] those that will be under construction would have been 1.5 GW by then,” he added.

EPI currently has operational renewable energy projects with a total capacity of 174 megawatts (MW).

About 487 MW are projects under construction and 1.8 GW in development stages.

Among the projects in the pipeline is the 240-MW solar project in Leyte with Shell Overseas Investments B.V. (Shell).

The first phase of the solar project, with a capacity of 120 MW, is targeted to be operational by the second quarter of 2025. EPI and Shell forged a joint venture in 2022 to develop one gigawatt of renewable projects in the country by 2028.

The EPI-Shell venture focuses on utility scale solar photovoltaic while “evaluating opportunities” in onshore wind and energy storage systems.

Outside the partnership, EPI, through its subsidiary Northern Palawan Power Generation Corp., is targeting to construct its 145MW solar project in Subic-Cawag by second quarter this year.

“We will construct by second quarter, as early as April for the development of 145-MW facility which we hope to operate by the fourth quarter of next year,” Mr. Dy said.

For geothermal, EPI is currently producing up to two MW of electricity, which it intends to scale up through the development of up to 10 MW.

“By 2026, we will more than deliver our goal of one GW by 2028 in an earlier timeline,” Mr. Dy said.