While many other power plants fail to deliver during this year’s El Nino-stricken weather temperatures, solar plants have been thriving as ‘powerhouse solution’ in shielding consumers from the wrath of unwanted blackouts or power service interruptions.

Rotational brownouts would typically evoke the all-too-familiar tales of frustration, inconvenience and economic losses, yet propitiously, the players in the solar sector have been reporting optimized generation in their facilities within the stretch of the summer season – and most especially during instances of ‘red’ and yellow alerts in the Luzon and Visayas grids.

Eric T. Francia, president and CEO of ACEN Corporation, conveyed that the company has been injecting higher generated electricity from its solar facilities – including their newly commercially-commissioned assets with aggregate capacity of more than 500 megawatts.

“We have over 500MWpeak (MWp) of new solar plants that are fully operating – these are the 385MWp San Marcelino and 133MWp Cagayan North projects – producing close to 20% capacity factor or around 2,500 megawatt-hours (MWh) per day during summer, so it’s definitely a huge help,” he stressed.

The San Marcelino solar plant of ACEN Corp in Zambales

The power of the sun also reigns supreme in the solar facilities of Citicore Renewable Energy Corporation (CREC) – and these have been helping keep the lights on when the two main grids in the country groan under extreme pressure due to simultaneous forced outages of the other technologies, and those are happening against the backdrop of soaring demand.

According to Citicore President and CEO Oliver Y. Tan, when supply strain struck Luzon and Visayas grids since April 16, “during the yellow alert, our solar plants generated 252,909.96 megawatt-hours; and during the red alert, 268,388.86 MWh for a total of 521,298.82 MWh for that day.”

The South Cotabato solar farm of Citicore 

Citicore has a portfolio of at least nine operating utility-scale solar farms sited in the Clark freeport zone and Arayat-Mexico in Pampanga, Cebu, Negros Occidental, Bataan, Bulacan, Tarlac and South Cotabato.

Additionally, Cleantech Global Renewables Inc. President and CEO Salvador Antonio R. Castro Jr. indicated that the solar generation of their company’s solar asset summed up to 306,080 MWh during last week’s capacity distress in the Luzon grid.

On April 16, Cleantech Global solar plants injected 107,316 MWh into the grid; then 108,502 MWh on the succeeding day and 90,262 MWh on another ‘red alert’ day on April 18.

The Cagayan North solar project of ACEN Corp and Cleantech Global Renewables

“Our performance had been good. As expected, we have better generation,” Castro said. The operating solar plant of the company is the Cagayan North installation which is its partnership with ACEN Corp of the Ayala group.

Aboitiz Power Corp. likewise announced that its two greenfield projects in Pangasinan – the Cayanga-Bugallon and Laoag solar farms – have already been synchronized recently to the grid, thus, beefing available capacity for Luzon.

The Cayanga-Bugallon solar farm project of Aboitiz Power in Pangasinan

The Department of Energy (DOE) is similarly counting on the optimized capacity of the solar plants during the summer season to shore up supply in a major way, because that is the period when their electricity generation would also be hitting peak.

Beyond the grid-connected solar photovoltaics, the ‘prosumers’ or the consumers generating their own electricity – either through solar rooftops or with their on-the-fence facility – are similarly liberating themselves from the chains of grid supply dependency; and that will ease up supply for the captive consumers of power utilities.