By Jed Macapagal | Malaya
The Manila Electric Co. (Meralco) eyes to bringing to 1,000 megawatts its renewable energy (RE) portfolio in the next five to seven years.
The company has set up a new subsidiary focused on the endeavor.
Ray Espinosa, president and chief executive officer of Meralco, said the company has seen “the inexorable shift to renewable energy.”
“Meralco is committed to developing large-scale renewable energy projects that can deliver competitive electricity for our customers, without any requirement for subsidy or support, while keeping environmental stewardship and sustainability as top priorities in our business,” Espinosa said.
Meralco’s current RE portfolio is only at 10 MW via investments from its affiliate firm, Spectrum, comprised of various utility scale, commercial rooftops and even residential rooftop solar developments.
Meralco set up MGen Renewable Energy Inc. (MGreen) to serve as the platform for the strategic push to develop RE projects, primarily solar, wind and run-of-river hydro.
MGreen will be a wholly owned subsidiary of Meralco PowerGen Corp. (MGen), the power generation arm of Meralco.
Rogelio Singson, MGen president and chief executive officer, said the company is e working on several renewable energy prospects.
“We recognize the significant reduction in the development cost, particularly for large-scale solar and wind over the past years,” Singson said.
“Notwithstanding the ongoing requirement for new reliable baseload generation to support the fast-growing Philippine economy, we believe that the time is right to focus on building our green energy capacity and we intend to be a key player in this expanding sector,” he added.
Singson said the push for RE investments is aligned with MGen’s growth aspirations that focus on utilizing high efficiency, low emission technology for baseload power plants.
Singson was earlier quoted as saying the company is keen on developing a total of 224 MW in land-based solar power projects eyed for completion this year until 2020 in order to serve RE power requirements under the Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS).
RPS is seen to benefit power generation developers as it will force all power distribution utilities to source a certain percentage of their supply from renewable power plants.
The Supreme Court’s recent decision mandating distribution utilities and power generators to conduct a competitive selection process before a power supply agreement can be approved has affected MGen’s plans to construct at least seven coal power plants with a total capacity of over 3,000 MW.