LT Group, the holding
firm of tycoon Lucio Tan, is eyeing a renewable energy (RE) deal with a company
led by former Energy Secretary Vince Perez. This involves a wind project in
Rizal.
Nestor Mendones,
senior vice president and chief finance officer of LT Group, Inc., said LT
Group is looking at a wind farm deal with Alternergy Wind One Corp.
Alternergy Wind, a
company led by Perez, is currently building a 54-megawatt wind farm project in
Brgy. Halayhayin, Pililla, Rizal.
“They [Alternergy]
have a project there. It just so happened that theirs is adjacent to one of LT
Group’s properties there so they asked us if we are interested to partner,” Mendones
said in an interview with reporters, adding that Alternergy is now planning to
expand their project in the area.
According to him, the
partnership was already “approved in principle by LT management.”
However, he said
there’s still no specific timetable as to when the deal will take place and
what the corporate structure will be.
“We will be a
minority partner of Alternergy. I just don’t know how many percent [we will be
allowed to buy],”
The Pililla Wind
Project, which consists of 27 wind turbine generators grouped into three
clusters with aggregate capacity of 67.5 megawatts (MW), costs USD177.9
million.
To be able to
bankroll the initial phase of the project, Alternergy Wind earlier borrowed a
USD100-million project financing from a syndicate of local commercial banks led
by Banco de Oro, China Bank, and Rizal Commercial Banking Corp.
Meanwhile, Gerardo
Tee of LT Group Distillery Operations, said the group is also eyeing another
wind farm project through its subsidiary Asian Alcohol Corp. (AAC).
AAC is the second
largest distillery in the Philippines located in Negros Occidental.
Utilizing its
10-hectare plant, the company has a daily rated capacity of 210,000 liters of
ethyl alcohol.
Tee said that it will
be very strategic for the company to put up a wind farm in the area because it
is beside the ocean.
He said the capacity
of the prospective wind farm will be around two megawatts to five megawatts
“depending on the technology and the power needs” of the plant.
Through its
subsidiary Absolut Distillers, Inc. (ADI) alone, the RE investments of LT Group
is already poised to amount to more than a billion peso as the company mulls
over the plan to set up a sugar mill and cogeneration plant in Batangas.
A few weeks ago, ADI
kicked off the third installment of its multi-million investment project on RE
with the establishment of a new bioethanol facility in Lian, Batangas.
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