Firm uses solar rooftops to help farmers reduce costs

Menlo Renewable Energy Corp. (MREN), a wholly owned subsidiary of MRC Allied Inc., has switched on a 550-kilowatt rooftop solar photovoltaic project for a rice mill in Northern Luzon.

MRC Allied said in a statement this was MREN’s pilot project for its Solar PV Portfolio, thus bringing the company closer to its goal of becoming a major renewable energy player in the Philippines.

The parent firm said this project would make renewable energy technology accessible to other industries such as the agricultural sector.

The installation would complement the peaking power needs of the unnamed rice mill and would help reduce power costs by about 30 percent.

Lower expenses for electricity would also translate to lower prices of milled rice.

“We have finally kicked off our [renewable energy] portfolio through this pilot project and we are working hard to produce more through our [renewable energy] subsidiary, MREN,” MRC Allied president Augusto Cosio said.

Cosio said the pilot project was realized in less than a year. He said he was looking forward to the inauguration of more projects in the future.

MRC Allied earlier said it was racking up in the next two years a portfolio of solar rooftop projects with a total of 12 megawatts in power generation capacity.

In the fourth quarter of 2018, MRC said it also broke ground for a 550-kW rooftop project at a rice mill in Nueva Ecija as well as two other rice mills, in addition to a similar project with a mall operator in Davao Oriental.

Aside from solar rooftops, MRC Allied planned to continue utility-scale projects such as the 50-MW solar project of Sulu Electric Power and Light Philippines Inc. where it had  a 15-percent stake as well as its own 100-MW solar project in Pampanga and 60-MW solar project in Cebu. —RONNEL W. DOMINGO