Philippine solar company Solana Solar has signed a power purchase agreement （PPA） with Philippine firm Kratos RES to supply 10-20MW of electricity from its upcoming Solana Solar Power Project in the Philippines.
The project, described as “shovel-ready” by UK-headquartered energy company Alternergy, of which Solana Solar is a subsidiary, will be built near the town of Hermosa, in the Central Luzon region of the Philippines. The facility will have a total capacity of 20MWdc, and its owners have already signed an agreement with the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines to connect the project to the national grid.
“We are pleased to partner with Kratos RES to help its electricity end-consumers achieve their sustainability goals and transition their power supply to renewable energy,” said Vicente Perez Jr, chair of Alternergy and chair and president of Solana Solar.
Should the project be completed as planned, it will significantly increase Alternergy’s footprint in the Philippines. Currently, the company operates a 12.5MWp solar farm on the island of Mindanao, alongside a 5MW rooftop solar project that generates power for the CityMalls chain of shopping centres.
The PPA will also bring together a number of companies, with groups connected to both Solana Solar and Kratos RES to be involved in the deal. Solana Solar is a subsidiary of the Solar Pacific Energy Corporation, itself a subsidiary of Alternergy, while Kratos is part of Prime Asset Ventures, itself a subsidiary of Israeli construction company Villar.
While both the project under construction and the PPA signed involve a small total power capacity, the deal is an encouraging demonstration of the viability of multi-party arrangements for solar power in the Philippines. Alternergy also announced, for instance, that it received additional funding for the project from “a leading Philippine commercial bank” and “a leading [engineering, procurement and construction] provider”。
The news is the latest encouraging development for solar power in the Philippines, which has seen considerable investment in recent years. Between 2012 and 2022, the total capacity of solar power installed in the country leaped from 2MW to 1.6GW, and the continued construction of small-scale solar will only add to this trend.
Elsewhere in the Philippines, the Solar Philippines Neva Ecija Corporation has announced plans to start work on a mammoth 3.5GW solar farm in the country later this year. The project would be the largest single solar farm in the world, and would singularly alter the nature of solar power in the Philippines, should it live up to its potential.
