The Laguna Lake Development Authority on Tuesday awarded the rights to SunAsia Energy Inc. to develop what could be the world’s largest floating solar project.
LLDA general-manager Senando Santiago handed the certificate of award to SunAsia Energy for 10 blocks of Laguna Lake surface spanning 1,000 hectares.
The 10 projects are estimated to generate a combined capacity of 1.3 gigawatts of solar energy.
It would be bigger than the 1,000-MW project of ACEN Corp. which signed a renewable energy contract area utilization agreement with LLDA for 800 hectares also in Laguna Lake.
“Land use is becoming a big issue for renewables particularly for solar energy projects. People and policymakers are worrying about competing uses of land. Currently, project developers are struggling to find land to locate the solar power plants. Most of the time, delays in solar energy projects are normally caused by consolidation of properties and late issuances of land conversion permits. So, there is an incentive to build on water,” said SunAsia.
SunAsia chief executive Tetchi Capellan said that at 1:1 ratio, the government’s target of building 44 GW of solar projects would require some 44,000 hectares of space.
“This is not an easy task to do because we need to balance energy with food, housing and urban development,” she said.
Laguna Lake is the largest freshwater lake in the Philippines covering 90,000 hectares. SunAsia Energy said the allocation of 2,000 hectares for floating solar sites would account for only about 2 percent of the total lake surface.
LLDA said that once operational, the floating solar projects in Laguna Lake could be one of the world’s engineering wonders, attracting visitors all over the world including academics, researchers and developers.
East Asian countries, including China and Japan, invested early and heavily into floating solar. About 80 percent of the total floating solar installations are located in the region, as reported by Wood Mackenzie. Given that the Philippines is an archipelago, with huge bodies of water, the country can be a leader in this field, it said.
SunAsia expressed hope the Department of Energy would set a higher installation target for floating solar in November this year to signal the commitment of the Philippine government to use this emerging technology as a pathway to ambitious decarbonization goal by 2050.
President Bongbong Marcos earlier declared the 1.3-GW floating solar project as national priority.
Construction of the project is expected to commence in 2025, with operations set to begin in 2026. Once completed, the project will light thousands of homes, run factories and increase the share of renewable energy in the total energy mix in the Philippines.
The estimated avoided cost of fuel will be 1 million tons of carbon.
SunAsia Energy is a pioneer developer of clean and renewable solar energy in the Philippines. It has applied for incentives at the Board of Investments for the 10 projects as strategic investments .