SunAsia challenges Terra Solar’s 850-MW offer to Meralco
RENEWABLE energy company SunAsia Energy, Inc. on Monday said it had submitted a letter of intent as a response to the “intimidating” bid invitation of Manila Electric Co. (Meralco) for 850 megawatts (MW) of mid-merit power supply for 20 years.
“For the first time, a community of solar developers and independent power producers broke free from their traditional mindset and decided to pool their resources and share talents to offer the largest utility company a green solution for 2026,” SunAsia President Tetchi C. Capellan said in a statement.
Ms. Capellan told BusinessWorld that the group would propose “distributed” power sourced from different areas to lessen electricity outages.
“The idea is to harvest solar energy in multiple sites. This solution proves more efficient as it increases the resiliency of the grid,” she said in the statement.
In January, Meralco called for competitive bids from renewable energy (RE) entities to challenge an unsolicited offer from Terra Solar Philippines, Inc. for the mid-merit power requirement.
Mid-merit power plants operate to fill the gap between baseload generation capacity and peak generation capacity.
Terra Solar is a joint venture between Razon-led Prime Infrastructure Capital, Inc. and Solar Philippines Power Project Holdings, Inc., the holding firm for the solar energy projects led by Leandro L. Leviste.
Terra Solar offered P6.0800 per kilowatt-hour (kWh) for headline rate and levelized cost of electricity (LCOE), Meralco said in a media release earlier.
“The combined expertise of multiple developers can match the proposal of a giant company. Of course, the success of this experiment rests in the hands of the Department of Energy (DoE) [as it will be] the guardian on how the competitive selection process is structured and their support will spell if the energy sector is ready to adopt a more radical way of procurement,” Ms. Capellan added.
This bidding process is in compliance with the DoE’s policy on renewable portfolio standards (RPS), which requires power distribution utilities and cooperatives to source a portion of their requirements from RE.
The deadline of the bid submission is on March 7.
Meralco’s controlling stakeholder, Beacon Electric Asset Holdings, Inc., is partly owned by PLDT, Inc. Hastings Holdings, Inc., a unit of PLDT Beneficial Trust Fund subsidiary MediaQuest Holdings, Inc., has interest in BusinessWorld through the Philippine Star Group, which it controls. — Marielle C. Lucenio
