By EUGENE ADIONG
LA CARLOTA City — San Carlos Solar Energy, Inc. (SaCaSol) yesterday broke ground for a solar energy project in this city.
The planned facility, expected to generate 18 megawatts (MW), is seen to provide additional power to Bacolod and Iloilo cities.
SaCaSol chairman Jose Maria Zabaleta Jr. said this is the company’s first solar project outside his hometown of San Carlos City, where the country’s first large-scale solar power facility was inaugurated on Thursday.
With an estimated cost of P1.8 billion, the solar farm SaCaSol II is expected to be completed by the end of the year.
Some 1,000 workers from La Carlota and the neighboring areas will be hired to work on the plant.
Zabaleta said the company will also start working on solar power plant projects in Manapla, Negros Occidental, and Bais City, Negros Oriental.
“We are now focusing on meeting the growing power demands in Negros and the neighboring areas,” the SaCaSol chairman said.
Zabaleta said their primary target customers are the National Grid Corp. of the Philippines and the National Transmission Company.
Eventually, all electric cooperatives in the country will use solar power, he mused.
Zabaleta said SaCaSol also welcomes Energy Secretary Jericho Petilla’s call to increase the country’s solar power quota to 450 MW from the current 50 MW to draw in more investments in the solar power technology.
Proposed, ongoing and completed solar power projects in the country have already breached the 50-MW cap, revealed Mario Marasigan, director of the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Renewable Energy Management Bureau.
The Energy department set the cap to secure the power grid and the electricity rates, given the intermittence and high power-generation cost of renewable energy.
DOE data showed that geothermal power accounts for 41.4 percent of the fuel input mix in the country’s power generation sector, followed by coal at 28 percent; natural gas, 15 percent; and hydro, 11.4 percent.
Meanwhile, Zabaleta said the construction of the biomass power plant of South Negros BioPower, Inc. will start as soon as SaCaSol II is completed./PN
