Garcia-led Vivant Corporation has earmarked capital spending of P30 billion for renewable energy (RE) and hybrid power facilities as well as infrastructure projects that it will be pursuing within the next three to five years.

During the company’s annual stockholders’ meeting, Vivant Chief Executive Officer Arlo A. G. Sarmiento announced that P25 billion of the programmed investments will be for the power sector while P5 billion will bankroll infrastructure projects which will primarily be focused on the provision of water supply for consumers in Cebu.

Of the targeted 599 megawatts of energy ventures, he emphasized that blueprinted developments comprise of 196MW wind and 212MW solar farms; plus there would be aggressive rollout of aggregate 129MW solar rooftop installations and the rest will be 62MW hybrid energy technology deployments.

Vivant President Emil Andre M. Garcia qualified that “for the projects, most of the RE will be developed solely by Vivant. There may be one or two projects that we’ll be looking at partnerships – especially the wind projects, since these are more technically challenging.”

Sarmiento expounded “as far as foreign partnerships are concerned, we look to them for the technical know-how they can bring in. As far as local partnerships are concerned, we look at local partnerships in the possibility of contracting capacity or even equity. Typically that’s how we look at partnerships - foreign or local.”

On access to project financing, Carmela Franco, EVP and chief corporate officer of Vivant, noted that what’s being explored will be issuance of corporate notes and there’s also plan to tap green bonds.

“The group is still much under-leveraged, so we plan to still tap the debt market - whether to fund this via green bond, that is one of the options we’re looking at. Other option we’re looking at is the issuance of corporate notes or syndicated loan,” she stressed.

When it comes to implementation timelines and siting of the energy projects, Garcia indicated that the development phase will be for the next three to five years and it will kick off this year.

The development terrain for the solar projects, he conveyed, will be majority in targeted sites in Luzon grid; while the wind farm developments will likely be pursued in the Visayas grid.

The hybrid power facilities, on the other hand, will cater mostly to off-grid areas and this will be anchored on a mix of conventional power technology, battery storage and solar, or possibly wind in some jurisdictions.

The off-take or capacity contracting for the generated electricity of the Vivant projects, according to Garcia, will be carried out through combination of bilateral agreements with distribution utilities, primarily those which will be complying with their required percentage of RE supply under the Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) policy sanctioned by the State.

Another course to be taken by the company is to join the government-underpinned Green Energy Auction Program (GEAP) , as the Department of Energy will also be scheduling series of RE capacity biddings in the years ahead.