Clean energy firm Asia Renewables Pte Ltd plans to acquire landfill, biogas and biomass projects in the Philippines, which is deemed by the regional community to have not only huge opportunities for power generation, but also favourable policies that will make such projects feasible.
“The Philippines has a pretty exciting potential because you have diverse resources and you have municipalities and big cities that require a lot of power demand. Your renewable energy policies also provide incentives to project developers to come in and take the lead,” said Shanthan Selvakumar, regional manager of Asia Renewables.
Asia Renewables is a clean-energy company that specializes in the development and ownership of renewable energy assets in Asian emerging markets. It has existing power projects in Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, India and China and has set its sights on the Philippines.
Selvakumar told the Inquirer that the company actually targeted to look—starting next year or 2012—into both the country’s available brownfield (which are operational projects) and greenfield projects, in which you have to start building the power facilities from scratch.
However, the company’s priority would be brownfield or existing landfill, biogas and biomass projects as these would help facilitate an easier entry into the Philippine renewable energy market, he added.
“We are into preliminary discussions with government officials and several local developers in the Philippines, though we have not begun on the ground project development yet,” Selvakumar added.
For landfill projects, Asia Renewables targets to look for and invest in Philippine projects that can convert 1,000 tons to 5,000 tons of waste a day. These projects, according to Selvakumar, were more attractive for the company as these could generate more energy and carbon credits.
He added that they were looking for Philippine biomass projects with capacities ranging from 5 megawatts to as much as 30 MW and for biogas livestock projects that could generate at least 1 MW. The company, he said, would be interested to invest or acquire such existing projects.
