THE board of Energy Development Corp. (EDC) has approved the public offering, issuance, and listing of the P10-billion second tranche of the company’s shelf-registered green bonds, its listed parent firm told the stock exchange on Wednesday.
Lopez-led First Gen Corp. subsidiary’s offering is part of its P15-billion shelf-registered ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) green bonds.
The second tranche offering is subject to the approval of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Philippine Dealing and Exchange Corp. (PDEx).
EDC listed the first tranche of P5 billion with PDEx on June 25, 2021.
“Due to the strong demand from investors for the first tranche bonds, the issuance was more than 10x oversubscribed, allowing EDC to exercise the oversubscription option and raise another P2 billion on top of the base issue size of P3 billion,” the company said in its 2021 release.
EDC Senior Vice-President and Chief Financial Officer Erwin O. Avante said the renewable energy company’s capital expenditure budget for next year is mainly “to cover growth projects among others.”
“We have seven ongoing projects as of the moment. But for this ASEAN green bond, we will still finalize [the] allocation which it will fund,” he told reporters.
In September, the company said it was planning to spend about $1 billion over the next three years to drill more geothermal wells to expand capacity.
EDC has an installed capacity of 1,480.19 megawatts (MW) of renewable energy, of which 1,185.40 MW comes from geothermal sources. — Sheldeen Joy Talavera