Ayala unit buys stake in Aussie power firm

The country’s oldest business house Ayala Corp. is debuting in Australia’s renewable energy space through a joint venture with international renewable energy developer UPC Renewables on a 4,600-megawatt (MW) energy portfolio in the continent.

Through wholly owned unit AC Energy, the group is investing $30 million for a 50-percent ownership in UPC’s Australian business. The local conglomerate has also committed a $200-million facility to fund project equity.

UPC Renewables Australia is developing the 1,000-MW Robbins Island and Jims Plain projects in North West Tasmania and the 600-MW New England Solar Farm located near Uralla in New South Wales. It has a further development portfolio of another 3,000 MW located in New South Wales, Tasmania and Victoria.

“AC Energy is very excited to invest in UPC Renewables Australia as it complements AC Energy’s goal to exceed 5,000 MWs by 2025. The UPC Renewables Australia platform is focused on large-scale projects and is managed by a high-quality management team,” AC Energy president and chief executive officer (CEO) Eric Francia said in a disclosure to the Philippine Stock Exchange on Wednesday.

“The Robbins Island project itself is a very large site and together with Jim’s Plains have some of the best proven wind resources in the world, and the New England Solar project has excellent solar resource within close proximity to transmission,” he said.

The CEO of UPC Renewables Australia, Anton Rohner, said AC Energy’s investment in UPC Renewables Australia would enable the group to accelerate projects in Australia.

“We are making progress on the Robbins Island and Jims Plain project in North West Tasmania and we endorse the prime minister’s recent comment about how wind and hydro are highly complementary. We expect our projects in North West Tasmania to have capacity factors in the order of 50 percent with the turbines producing power nearly 95 percent of the time,” he said.

“The Robbins Island and Jims Plain projects, together with Tasmania’s hydro assets and other new renewable energy projects, will assist in making the interconnectors between Tasmania and Victoria, a dispatchable and significant renewable energy generator into the national electricity market,” he added.

Earlier, AC Energy unveiled plans to sell as much as 50 percent of its 1,600-megawatt thermal or coal energy assets to raise capital to support regional expansion.

AC Energy is among the four businesses that its parent conglomerate had identified to be those that would give it a global footprint. In two years’ time, 10 percent of Ayala’s earnings are expected to come from overseas businesses.

Half of the next $1 billion that AC Energy has committed to invest in the energy space is expected to be earmarked for international businesses. AC Energy expects the share of overseas business to expand to 30-40 percent in a few years from only 20 percent at end-March.