Megawide group, Solar PH forge joint venture
A SISTER company of listed builder Megawide Construction Corp. is venturing into renewable energy, partnering with Solar Philippines Power Project Holdings Inc. to roll out a number of power projects nationwide.
Citicore Power Inc., a sister company of Megawide, and Solar Philippines have agreed to build several solar power farms with a combined capacity of 250 megawatts (MW).
Megawide CEO Michael Cosiquien said at the signing ceremony yesterday that the partnership marked his group’s first entry into power generation and renewable energy which was an ideal segment to start in.
“We are happy to do it with a company that shares our entrepreneurial spirit,” he said.
Megawide and Citicore Power are wholly owned subsidiaries of Citicore Holdings Investment Inc., which Cosiquien founded. The group has investments in airports, hospitals, schools, and other infrastructure projects.
Solar Philippines CEO Leandro Leviste hailed the partnership as the first purely Filipino venture into grid-scale solar projects.
The partners’ initial project has a capacity of 60 MW and will cost around $144 million. The total investment for the 250 MW, including the initial project, will be about $625 million, Leviste said.
Megawide and Citicore CFO Oliver Tan said the debt-to-equity ratio would be about 70-30.
“For the target 250 MW solar farm projects alone, the total estimated project cost is around $625 million, hence the 70 percent of that would be around $420 million,” he said.
Tan said Citicore Power’s medium-term vision was to put up 350 MW to 400 MW of mixed renewable energy technologies such as solar, hydro and biomass, Tan said. This target includes the 250 MW of solar power projects to be undertaken with Solar Philippines.
Leviste said that the 50-50 partnership would unlock synergies between the two companies to build the largest solar portfolio in Southeast Asia.
Both parties will invest equally in each project, and leverage their expertise in construction to complete the projects in time to avail of the Department of Energy’s Feed-in-Tariff, an incentive for the first 500 MW in solar projects to connect to the national grid.
The partnership’s first project will be 60 MW in Calatagan, Batangas, where construction has already begun. Once operational, the plant will supply enough to power the entire Western Batangas, and become the largest solar farm in Luzon.
