AC Energy eyes Vietnam project

By Lenie Lectura – July 19, 2017

from Business Mirror

AC Energy Holdings Inc., the power arm of conglomerate Ayala Corp., is actively pursuing potential investments in renewable energy (RE) projects in  Vietnam.

AC Energy President and CEO John Eric Francia said on the sidelines of the Philippines Power and Electricity Week forum he is scheduled to visit Vietnam this weekend.

“We’re doing a lot of early business development works in Vietnam,” he said. “We’re very busy.”

He did not discuss details of his impending trip, but said AC Energy is “talking to potential partners” in Vietnam to pursue an investment in RE, particularly in wind and solar power.

“It’s really exploring partners. We will not invest on our own in Vietnam,” Francia said. “We will do it if we have local partners.”

He added the  Feed-in-Tariff (FiT)  regime in Vietnam is among the reasons AC Energy wants to pursue an investment there.

“There’s FiT for solar and wind in Vietnam. We’re also open to conventional. The government is going to ‘equitization’, privatization process, so we’re looking at that, but nothing is imminent yet. We’re just monitoring their ‘equitization’ process,” he said.

Based on Vietnam’s FiT rules on solar-power projects, a two-year FiT regime is currently being enforced.

“There’s a deadline: June 2019. The [solar] plant should be running by then.” The prospective project in Indonesia involves foreign and local partners. “It’s a three-way partnership with AC Energy owning between 70 percent to 75 percent,” Francia had said, adding that the wind project is less than 100 megawatts (MW) in capacity.

“[Indonesia] has a big demand. If you look at its market, it’s growing,” he said in an earlier interview.

AC Energy is targeting another 1,000 MW of additional capacity from the current 1,000 MW already put in place together with partners.

Of the new target, the company expects 60 percent to come from RE sources, which include solar and wind.