Maybe something has been lost in translation but the announcement by the Philippines government’s official news agency of the deal signed to secure the city of Bacolod’s first large scale solar farm would appear to indicate the Korean company involved was a somewhat wary partner.
Filipino company Amatera Renewable Energy Corp has signed an agreement with Korea’s TPC Construction Corp to develop a 50 MW facility at Barangay Vista Alegra, according to a report published by the state-owned Philippines News Agency on Saturday.
Good news then, with Bacolod ready to embrace the PHP2 billion ($38.6 million) development on a 74-hectare farm belonging to the family that owns Amatera.
At this point, both parties officially make positive noises about the deal for inclusion in the accompanying press release – or at least their PR departments do.
Over to TPC Construction president Charles Ji, who attended a ceremony in L’ Fisher Chalet on Friday to mark the agreement. “As a Korean, it was very difficult to do business in the Philippines,” Ji reportedly told the gathering before talking of his pride in signing the deal and adding the project would be “based on Korea’s superior technology”. And to round things off in a suitable manner, Ji added: “We will prepare thoroughly to ensure that construction and operation will not be disrupted.”
Popular content
The news wire reported TPC will now seek investors for the project with the aim of getting it operational within a year.
Amatera chief finance officer Ramon Luis Lacson struck a more conventional tone at the ceremony, saying: “From the bottom of our hearts, Charles, thank you for trusting our family and we also extend our trust in you. We hope that this renewable energy project will deliver power to our city, which is a clean and more progressive type of energy that will be appreciated by our children and our children’s children.”
The Bacolod project was added to a list of approved facilities by the Philippines Department of Energy in June 2016.
This content is protected by copyright and may not be reused. If you want to cooperate with us and would like to reuse some of our content, please contact: editors@pv-magazine.com.
1 comment
By submitting this form you agree to pv magazine using your data for the purposes of publishing your comment.
Your personal data will only be disclosed or otherwise transmitted to third parties for the purposes of spam filtering or if this is necessary for technical maintenance of the website. Any other transfer to third parties will not take place unless this is justified on the basis of applicable data protection regulations or if pv magazine is legally obliged to do so.
You may revoke this consent at any time with effect for the future, in which case your personal data will be deleted immediately. Otherwise, your data will be deleted if pv magazine has processed your request or the purpose of data storage is fulfilled.
Further information on data privacy can be found in our Data Protection Policy.