Aboitiz Power Corp. said Thursday it plans to increase the company’s renewable energy footprint to 65 percent of its power generation portfolio over the next 10 years.
Aboitiz Power president Emmanuel Rubio said the company planned to shift its focus on more RE development by participating in the government’s renewable energy portfolio standard and green energy option programs.
“RPS and GEOP will provide significant opportunities for renewable energy. We expect DOE will be strict in compliance, resulting in a requirement for additional capacity by 2029 of just a little less than 10,000 MW [megawatts], assuming the capacity factor of the RE technology that will be installed is around 18 percent,” Rubio said.
RPS is a policy mechanism that requires electric power industry participants such as generators, distribution utilities and suppliers to source or produce a specified fraction of their electricity from eligible RE resources.
The program is anchored on the country’s aspirational target of 35 percent RE share in the energy mix by 2030 and takes effect this year.
Meanwhile, GEOP guides users and developers on the options to take in RE sourcing.
“We are preparing to participate and capture a piece of this market. We are also looking at RE opportunities in SEA [Southeast Asia], particularly in Vietnam. All of these will contribute to a shift in our portfolio by 2029 to a more balanced RE to thermal ratio,” Rubio said. Thermal plants include coal, oil and natural gas-fed generating facilities.
Rubio earlier said the company was bullish about business prospects in the next 10 years.
“Aboitiz Power remains plosive about driving long-term growth for all its stakeholders. We continued to push our balanced mix strategy because we believe that the long-term energy security of the country can be solved by balancing sustainability, accessibility, and reliability of power,” the official said.
Rubio said the company would likely perform better next year as new plants were expected to come online, resulting in less power outages.
“We’ve been beset by plant outages especially during the first half of the year and during summer when usually prices are high. All of our plants now are operational from July, and we were able to sell a significant amount of our capacity when Malampaya went under maintenance for about two weeks,” he said.
Rubio said he was not expecting the outages to spill over to 2020 as the company put in place corrective actions, “and so with that, we expect a good performance with regard to availability in 2020.”