Manila Bulletin
by Ruth Manimtim-Floresca
October 19, 2014
With the Philippines experiencing natural disasters that keep on increasing in strength and frequency in recent years, there is a great need for strategic disaster risk reduction and management, which can create shared value for business and society.
This year, SM Supermalls’ annual symposium on sustainable business practices focused on “The Business Case for Disaster Risk Reduction.” The 2014 Green Retail Agenda sought to educate, create awareness, and emphasize action points within the private sector and other key stakeholders to ensure disasters will be prepared for and recovered from.
One of the conference’s presenters, Leandro Legarda Leviste, president of Solar Philippines, reports, “[We] started last year with a mission to offer solar energy cheaper than fossil fuel, paving the way for its adoption by every home and business in the country.”
INCREASING CONSUMER ADOPTION
The company’s first project in Central Mall Biñan started generating 0.7 megawatt (MW) power recently on the largest self-consumption power plant in Southeast Asia. The solar panels were installed with zero upfront cost made possible through a signed purchase power agreement between Solar Philippines and Premiumlink, the company operating the establishment.
Energy generated by the solar rooftop is sold to the mall at a rate lower than the usual electricity rates, for its own consumption. Solar energy covers 30 percent of the mall’s total energy usage and enables the management to save more than P100,000 a month on electricity.
Leviste recognizes that solar is cost-competitive but still capital-intensive, such that most businesses won’t invest in the installation of something that’s not in line with their core business. “Only by offering solar at zero upfront can we unlock a wider market,” he says.
This October, the largest commercial solar rooftop in the Philippines would be completed in SM North Edsa, with panels that can produce 1.5MW, and which can power up to 1,200 households.
Leviste concedes that solar still holds the same reputation it had since its earlier days. “Some people still think it’s expensive, unreliable, only suited for small-scale application, and are skeptical that it even works,” he shares, “[but] it takes just one company to take a leap of faith and have the vision that this kind of new technology in fact works and is commercially viable.”
Solar rooftop construction in SM North Edsa will be finished this October.
Solar rooftop construction in SM North Edsa will be finished this October.
By being the first publicly listed company to adopt this technology in the Philippines, Leviste says, “all others have followed. The moment we showed our other customers that there’s this ongoing new project on SM North Edsa, what was once a farfetched idea suddenly became credible simply because of [brand association].”
The impact goes far beyond that, Leviste asserts. He predicts every mall chain in the country will one day have solar rooftop installations: “[What] we’re going for here is not just the large commercial establishments, but also residential rooftops. The benefit of solar in such public places as malls is that, hopefully, all visitors will one day go home and think of having solar panels installed on their rooftops as well.”
Solar Philippines offers residential, and small commercial and industrial buildings affordable turnkey installations. Building the country’s largest projects allows Solar Philippines to offer the lowest rates while still using equipment from the world’s number one suppliers.
“Our company is now constructing more than 10 times the amount of solar rooftop installations that were installed in the entire Philippines in 2013. And the rest of the industry is taking off with many solar farms in the provinces,” reveals Leviste.
LOWER COSTS
A report entitled The Resource Revolution by McKinsey, a global management consultancy firm, predicts that from the challenges of sustainability in the 21st century, there would arise the biggest opportunities.
“Truly, necessity is the mother of invention,” states Leviste. “A perfect example of innovations is improvements in manufacturing and efficiency of solar panels that have caused prices to decrease more than 80 percent over the last six years. During which time Meralco prices had increased over 30 percent. This invalidates the classic view that solar is expensive and only viable with subsidies,” he says.
While energy prices continue to rise, Leviste reasons that it makes even more economic sense for every rooftop in the country to be covered in solar panels. “This is already happening in the U.S. and Europe. But the most exciting part is that it works even without subsidies,” he says.
Solar Philippines is the first local all-in solar solutions provider that takes care of each project from end-to-end, all under one roof, via a complete team of engineers and subcontractors. The tighter quality control and leaner cost structure, explains Leviste, enable them to pass on savings to consumers and achieve their goal of making solar cost-competitive to fossil fuel in the Philippines for the first time.
ADDRESSING CLIMATE CHANGE
To better put things in perspective, Leviste compares the energy industry today to the telecom industry in the early ’90s. “At the time, many telephone companies predicted that most wireless technologies’ reach would only be single-digit penetration. But now, this distributed technology of wireless handsets is everywhere,” he points out.
The same, he says, has happened with mainframe computers two decades prior, which were replaced by personal computers. “Increasingly, even the business of generating and distributing power is being democratized and decentralized,” Leviste says, adding, “ We believe that [the energy crisis] is the single, most significant challenge faced by the 21st century and this has the single, highest impact way to address the problem of climate change head on.”
BETTER OPTIONS
According to Leviste, the days of having to choose between the environment and business are over. “We are used to thinking there has to be a trade-off between what’s good for the environment and what is good for one’s bottom line. But that has been changed by two factors. First, the threat of climate change, and second, the scarcity of fossil fuels,” he says.
The depletion of our natural resources is leading to a historic rise in commodity prices. As a result, businesses develop and adopt entirely new and innovative ways to meet their energy and utility requirements so as to wean away their dependency on coal and oil.
“This is not something to shy away from. This is something to embrace,” Leviste says. source
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