Singapore-headquartered Blueleaf Energy is committed to invest over $2 billion in renewable energy (RE) projects with a combined capacity of as much as 3 gigawatts (GW) over the next 5 years.
“Our ambition for Blueleaf’s overall portfolio is going to be all onshore renewable technologies. Our major focus is solar PV, wind, as well as storage. We are looking at investing into a couple of hydro, run-off river hydro, large hydro assets. But specifically for Philippines, I would say it’s more solar, onshore wind and storage.
Our intention is eventually to provide in the future a 24/7 renewable energy supply for the Philippines’s people. It’s not realizable immediately right now, but we’re working towards a pathway to reach it. Our goal is we would like to at least do between two to three gigawatts of renewables in the Philippines over the next five years. And that would translate to investment commitment in excess of $2 billion,” said Blueleaf CEO Raghuram Natarajan last week.
In the Philippines, Blueleaf has partnered with SunAsia Energy for the development of 610.5 megawatt foating solar facilities on the water surface of Laguna Lake – that spans through the cities of Calamba, Sta Rosa and Cabuyao as well as the towns of Bay and Victoria.
Natarajan said its long-term investment in the Philippines would include other local partners.
“SunAsia is one of our major partners in the Philippines. But we do work together with other partners as well depending upon technology, location. And approach has always been in every country that we work with local partners because we do want to make sure that we are actively engaging. We are a global company, but we act very local.
Together with partners, we are looking to build around 2, 3 gigawatts for the next 5 years. That’s roughly 2,000 megawatts at least in the next 5 years in the Philippines and regionally we are looking at an ambition of between 8 to 10 gigawatts around Asia Pacific,” added Natarajan.
The service contracts awarded last week by the Department of Energy (DOE) to Blueleaf and SunAsia have 25-year operating period each.
“This project, in total are 10 service contracts which could be around 1.3 GW in terms of capacity. This is the first phase of 6 service contracts and we will be coming back for 4 more service contracts which will be issued very quickly.”