Ayala unloads shares in 3 hydropower firms

Conglomerate Ayala Corp. has unloaded its controlling interest in three hydropower generation companies as a strategy to focus on energy projects with critical mass.

The group’s power generation arm AC Energy Holdings Inc. signed definitive documents to sell its stakes in QuadRiver Energy Corp., Philnew Hydro Power Corp. and PhilnewRiver Corp. to Sta. Clara Group Inc., Ayala told the Philippine Stock Exchange Tuesday.

Prior to the sale, AC Energy held 70 percent of the outstanding capital stock of each of the hydro companies while Sta. Clara Power held the remaining 30 percent.

“AC Energy will focus on solar and wind development, which is more scalable, and could revisit hydro in the future,” AC Energy president and chief executive officer John Eric Francia explained in an e-mail.

The hydro companies are grantees of several hydropower service contracts from the Department of Energy.

Francia said the three hydro companies had less than 100 megawatts of service contracts and only about 10 percent of targeted capacity was under development.

AC Energy achieved its target of building 1,000 MW in attributable capacity as the construction of the first unit of its 2×668 MW power plant GNPower Dinginin in Mindanao went full swing. To date, AC Energy has seven thermal, wind and solar power generation assets, with five operating plants delivering 1,000 MW of power to the grid.

The two plants under construction, GNPower Kauswagan and GNPower Dinginin, are expected to add another 1,200 MW to the grid in 2018 and 2019, respectively.

AC Energy aims to make available another 1,000 MW in attributable capacity by 2020, 60 percent of which will be renewable energy.

“We are still on track with our 2020 goal of 2,000 MW,” Francia said.
Before the Christmas holiday break, AC Energy expanded its energy assets as part of a consortium that won a deal to buy significant stakes in the geothermal assets sold by multinational energy giant Chevron in the Philippines and Indonesia.

The acquisition was seen as a major milestone for AC Energy as this scaled up its renewable energy platform and established its presence in Indonesia.

In Indonesia, Chevron subsidiaries operate the Darajat and Salak geothermal fields in West Java, with a combined capacity of 235 MW equivalent of steam and 402 MW of electricity.