SP New Energy Corp. (SPNEC) on Thursday said it plans to break ground this year on its Nueva Ecija solar expansion project, which will be controlled by the company.
The company has invested the bulk of the proceeds of its capital raises in this project, including Metro Pacific Investment Corp.’s initial investment of P2 billion.
It is planned to be one of the world’s largest solar power plants and will be controlled by SPNEC, the company said.
“We have ongoing discussions on shareholding arrangements in certain of our projects, to find solutions that will benefit all parties,” Solar Philippines founder Leandro Leviste said after the company’s stockholders’ meeting.
“Out of deference for these discussions and respect to our partners, we will not yet elaborate, other than to say that: We believe that it is in SPNEC’s interest to invest in projects where it has a controlling stake, and that SPNEC is best served by allocating its capital to projects where this is the case.”
The Nueva Ecija expansion project comprises over 3,000 hectares acquired or being acquired in the same general area as the company’s first Nueva Ecija solar farm covering an area of over 350 hectares, which would bring the group’s total land in the area secured to over 3,500 hectares.
This scale is enabled by Solar Philippines which has been consolidating land and permits for this project since 2016, when it applied for its first Department of Energy solar energy service contract in this area.
The clustering of projects in the same area also supports the development of transmission, which would extend over 60 kilometers to connect to National Grid Corp. of the Philippines’s substations that supply the greater Manila area.
With a total planned 4 gigawatts of solar farm developments, the company said its combined developments in Nueva Ecija would surpass the capacity of India’s Bhadla Solar Farm, currently the world’s largest farm at over 2.2 GW. “It will also surpass the capacity of the total grid-connected solar operating in the Philippines as of the end of 2022 at over 1.4 GW.”
