Citicore Renewable Energy Corporation, subsidiary of Filipino firm Citicore Power, targets to ramp up its solar farm developments for an aggregate capacity that will reach 1,500 megawatts in the next five years.

The company currently has 238MW of installations. Its newest project is a 75MW solar farm development in Pampanga, which is its joint venture with AC Energy of the Ayala group.

Citicore reiterated it “has a robust pipeline of solar projects totaling 1.5 gigawatts to be rolled out in the next five years,” although there are no specific sites and scale of investments laid down yet for the upcoming developments.

Oliver Tan, president of Citicore, asserted that the company’s completed projects already “contributed to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by more than 600,000 metric tons,” and had lighted roughly 4.0 million homes and spurred job creation at its host communities.

Among its existing solar projects are those of the Next Generation Power Technology Corporation in Bataan; the First Toledo Solar Energy Corporation project in Cebu; and the Silay solar farm in Negros Occidential.

Previously, Citicore Power also secured five service contracts for large-scale hydropower projects that could yield up to 2,3000 megawatts of capacity once they reach commercial development phases.

The company indicated these ventures will help concretize its grand ambition of becoming one of the major players in the electric power industry, with specific focus on the renewable energy (RE) investment space.

The planned facilities will be equipped with pumped storage systems. The hydro service contracts that were awarded by the Department of Energy (DOE) shall serve as the license for the project company to push ahead with pre-development works in the prospect facilities.

Such would cover the processes on permitting and the conduct of various studies to establish the viability of the planned hydropower installations.

Citicore said the proposed ventures “are congruent to (its) goal of providing green energy, while protecting the environment and setting up economic opportunities for the communities where the projects are located.”

Notably, the country’s power mix paradigm still remains a puzzle to many of the industry players, but as has been constantly asserted by the energy department, RE would be a welcome competition to the prevailing dominance of fossil fuels.

For hydro, the investment is still at considerably massive scale of $3.0 million per megawatt – and life cycle on project implementations are often at long lead times.