The acquisition marks an important milestone for the power utility as it expands its RE footprint into South-East Asia

By PRIYA VASU / Pic by BERNAMA

TENAGA Nasional Bhd’s (TNB) wholly-owned subsidiary, TNB Renewables Sdn Bhd, will acquire a 39% stake from Sunseap Group in a 21.6MW project comprising five rooftop solar plants in Vietnam.

In a filing to Bursa Malaysia yesterday, the power utility noted the acquisition extends TNB’s collaboration with Singapore-based Sunseap, beyond Malaysia and Singapore cross-border partnership, to rapid growing renewable-energy (RE) markets like Vietnam.

The project has secured the feed-in-tariff (FiT) under the FiT2 scheme in Vietnam, which is intended to promote investments in RE sources through lucrative and above market rate tariffs.

Having achieved commercial operation date in December 2020, all five plants are under a 20-year power purchase agreement with the state-owned utility company, Vietnam Electricity, to supply clean energy to the country’s national grid.

Sunseap currently holds 90% stake in the projects, which will be reduced to 51% upon completion of the 39% stake acquisition by TNB Renewables slated for the first quarter of this year.

Sun Times Energy Joint Stock Co, an existing shareholder of the projects, will continue to own the remaining 10% equity interest.

The acquisition marks an important milestone for TNB as it expands its RE footprint into South-East Asia.

“Prior to this acquisition, TNB’s global presence in RE consists of a total portfolio of 2,732.3MW in Malaysia (including 2,536.1MW of large hydro) and 666MW across the UK, Turkey and India comprising mainly solar, wind and hydro energy generation assets,” said TNB.

TNB aims to grow its overall RE portfolio to 8,300MW by 2025 (including large hydro). Sunseap is one of the top solar rooftop companies in South-East Asia and the largest solar company in Singapore, with fully integrated solar business including presence in the energy retail segment.

It has a net capacity of 1.2GW across 11 markets and more than 200 assets in various stages of development.

The latest 21.6MW rooftop solar project adds to Sunseap’s 168MW utility-scale solar farm it had built-in Vietnam in 2019, and it is currently developing over 650MW of additional projects in Vietnam.