Solar Phl contracts more than half of solar capacity target

Solar Philippines has contracted more than half of its planned 10-gigawatt (GW) solar power capacity.

In a disclosure to the Philippine Stock Exchange yesterday, Solar Philippines said the total solar capacity contracted has reached over six GW.

This is after the company won 70 percent or 1,380 megawatts (MW) out of the 1,967 MW of renewable energy (RE) capacity auctioned off by the Department of Energy (DOE) in the first round of the Green Energy Auction Program (GEAP) earlier this month.

Of this, Solar Philippines secured 91 percent of all the solar capacity or 1,350 MW out of 1,490 MW.

Part of this will be sourced from the first 500-MW capacity being developed by Solar Philippines Nueva Ecija Corp. (SPNEC), with the rest planned to be sourced from projects under entities that will be owned by SPNEC after its asset-forshare swap with its parent company.

These include projects with a total 1.8 GW planned capacity, namely the Tarlac-2 400MW Solar Farm; the Quezon 800-MW Solar Farm; the Leyte 400-MW Solar Farm; and the GenSan 200-MW Solar Farm.

Under the DOE’s terms of reference, bid capacities refer to net export and not plant gross capacities.

Meanwhile, Solar Philippines said the other capacities under contract include the 3.5GW solar, 4.5-gigawatt-hour (GWh) battery Terra Solar project – which will supply Manila Electric Co. (Meralco) 850 MW of mid-merit capacity, another over 200 MW of projects contracted with Meralco; and over 175 MW of already operational capacity.

These projects would complete its potentially nine terawatt-hours (TWh) per year of contracted energy, which would serve as a critical mass of demand for its 10 GW of developments scheduled to commence operations mostly between 2025 to 2026.

On the other hand, Solar Philippines said energy that remains uncontracted may be sold to the wholesale electricity spot market (WESM).

“When we began talking about 10 GW, many were in disbelief, because the total installed solar capacity of the Philippines last year was just over 1.1 GW. But we hope that having contracts for the majority of 10 GW has now made this plausible,” Solar Philippines founder Leandro Leviste said.

“We were fortunate to have been at the right place at the right time, developing these projects since 2016. Now we have contracted this capacity, we look forward to work with other companies and stakeholders to deliver these projects and help achieve our country’s targets for renewable energy,” he said.

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 billion.