Kbank: Loans unlikely for many solar farm projects
Many solar-farm projects with a total capacity of more than 1,000 megawatt cannot be sanctioned loans by the end of this year due to the high risks, a senior Kasikornbank official has said.
Nopadej Karnasuta, senior vice president for KBank’s multi-corporate business department, said recently that the bank has approved loans for solar-farm projects with a combined capacity of 200MW. There are pending projects with a combined capacity of 1,000MW that are awaiting loans, which are called very small power producers or VSPP. Each plant has an average capacity of 6-8MW.
“We don’t expect to consider all projects applying for loans by the end of this year as most of them have a due date to supply electricity to Provincial Electricity Authority (PEA) by December this year. The bank has also taken into account other factors such as the technology of solar-cell plates and reliability of the investors, and not merely the electricity purchase and sale agreement that the power producers have signed at the adder rate of Bt8 per unit with the authority. Some technologies have less efficiency in generating electricity.
According to PEA’s initial data in 2011, about 700 solar farm projects offered to sell electricity to the PEA, a total capacity of 3,000MW. Of the proposals, only 44 projects, with a total capacity of 44MW, can supply electricity into the system. More than 400 projects, which have signed electricity purchase and sale agreements with the PEA, have been waiting for investment and construction.
Some investors, who have close relations with politicians, now hold a number of licences for investing in solar farm projects and are waiting to resell the licences at premium prices. Each licence, could fetch a profit of Bt5 million to Bt10 million.
