Filipino-led firm Citicore Renewable Energy Corp. (CREC) has secured $100 million financing that will greatly help in advancing the commercial development of roughly 500-megawatt of its blueprinted solar projects.

The mezzanine construction green loan facility, according to Citicore, was structured by Pentagreen Capital, which is a joint venture between HSBC and Temasek.

Of the total loan amount, Citicore specified that $30 million had been committed by Pentgareen for the initial tranche.

The company noted that the funding could be funneled into portfolio of at least six solar farm projects that may potentially yield 490MW of capacity that will be installed at various sites within Luzon grid.

As emphasized by CREC President and CEO Oliver Tan, “Pentagreen’s partnership with Citicore Renewables is a vote of confidence in our ability to scale up, enabling us to achieve our planned 1GW (gigawatt) project rollout this year.”

The company’s greenfield RE project developments had been cast for ramp up to aggregate 5,000MW or 5.0GW in five years.

The Pentagreen-underpinned project funding, Tan said, “unlocks the development of our renewable energy capacity pipeline in an accelerated manner.”

Through that credit portfolio, Citicore reiterated it would be able to “allocate capital efficiently to accelerate the development of its project pipeline in line with its planned rollout of 1.0-gigawatt of renewable energy capacity per year in the next 5 years."

It specified that the initial tranche of $30 million “will provide funding for the construction of four greenfield projects” - plus the two more facilities that had been recently completed.

CREC expounded that “Pentagreen’s commitment is the first international institutional investment and is designed to enable mobilization of additional debt funding to support the construction of Citicore Renewables’ ready-to-build projects.“

Marat Zapparov, CEO of Pentagreen Capital., sounded off their firm’s enthusiasm “to partner with Citicore Renewables to support its ambition of becoming a leading green electricity provider in the Philippines.”

On Citicore’s assessment, “these projects are expected to add around 691-gigawatt hours (GWh)) of renewable electricity supply into the Luzon grid annually.”

Beyond added power capacity to the grid, the Citicore solar farms will also usher in avoided greenhouse gas emissions of 430,000 tonnes of CO2 annually.”

The company explained that the calculated  carbon emissions reduction had been “in accordance with the methodology established by the International Financial Institutions Technical Working Group on Greenhouse Gas Accounting.” 

For the generated electricity of the programmed solar installations, off-takes are targeted both for bilateral contracts  and for offers into the spot market.