Just days ago Finance Secretary Frederick Go announced that the national government is courting fresh investment to push forward a San Miguel Bay Offshore Wind Power Project in Camarines Sur — a development officials say is on track to become not just the Philippines’ first offshore wind farm, but possibly the first in all of Southeast Asia.
The project would have little immediate impact on Catanduanes’ power supply, however.
In a Department of Finance statement, Go said he met with executives of Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (CIP), the Danish fund developing the project, along with partner ACEN Corporation, to accelerate construction.
Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners is a Danish fund manager and major global investor in energy infrastructure, founded in 2012. It focuses on solar and wind power, energy storage, transmission and distribution, advanced bioenergy, low-carbon fuels, and carbon capture. It operates projects in more than 30 countries.
ACEN Corporation, based in Makati, is the Ayala group’s listed renewable energy company in the Philippines, focused on developing, building, and operating clean power projects across the Asia-Pacific region. It has a growing portfolio of solar, wind, geothermal, and battery storage assets, and it is one of the fastest-growing renewable energy platforms in the region.
Once completed, the offshore wind farm is expected to generate 901 megawatts of power — enough to meaningfully reshape the power mix of the Bicol region. Go said offshore wind development is critical to the country’s long-term energy security and renewable energy goals.
The project would be in San Miguel Bay, the large body of water on the northern Bicol Peninsula shared by Camarines Sur and Camarines Norte, with turbine arrays planned across the municipal waters of Calabanga, Tinambac, and Siruma. CIP began surveying the site in 2024 with backing from the Camarines Sur provincial government, which has touted the roughly $3-billion investment as a boost to jobs, tourism, and provincial revenue. ACEN bought a 25-percent stake in the venture in 2025.
Tight timeline
The timeline remains tight. The Department of Energy is running this push through its fifth Green Energy Auction (GEA-5), dedicated solely to offshore wind, after the Energy Regulatory Commission approved a ceiling price of ₱11.00 per kilowatt-hour for bidders in February. The DOE is targeting first power from offshore wind by 2028, but no project nationwide has yet broken ground “in the water” — no foundations laid, no turbines installed.
Industry analysts point to unfinished port upgrades, a still-developing local workforce, and looming questions about disruption to fisherfolk as the real bottlenecks standing between announcement and electricity.
Why Catanduanes should pay attention
For Catandunganons living through SUWECO’s financial collapse and the island’s continuing reliance on diesel generators, a major new generation source going up just across the water in Camarines Sur is worth watching closely — though not for reasons that will show up on anyone’s electric bill soon.
Catanduanes is not physically wired into this project. The island still runs largely as its own isolated grid, dependent on barged-in diesel and whatever SUWECO and its emergency suppliers can keep running.
The island’s long-discussed lifeline out of that isolation is the proposed Camarines Sur–Catanduanes Interconnection Project (CCIP), a roughly ₱9.5-billion submarine cable that would, for the first time, tie Catanduanes directly into the Luzon grid through Camarines Sur.
If that cable is ever built, San Miguel Bay’s 901 megawatts — plus whatever else gets added to the Camarines Sur grid in the coming years — becomes part of the pool of power Catanduanes could eventually draw from, rather than a story happening next door with no bearing on local outlets. That is a real, if distant and conditional, upside: a bigger, more diversified, theoretically cheaper supply on the mainland side of a cable that does not yet exist.
The catch is that both pieces — the wind farm and the cable — are still years from completion, and neither is guaranteed to land on schedule.
Camarines Sur’s getting more generation capacity does nothing for Catanduanes unless and until the interconnection is funded, built, and energized.
For now, the island’s power future still rests more on diesel generators, solar adoption, and the pace of SUWECO’s recovery than on turbines spinning offshore in San Miguel Bay.
Still, as the national government leans harder into offshore wind and the process moves forward this year, it is a development worth tracking — because the day Catanduanes finally gets its cable to the mainland, what is being built in Camarines Sur right now will matter a great deal.
Elsewhere in Southeast Asia, Vietnam has multiple planned offshore and near-shore projects, including a 3,400 MW Thang Long project in Tra Vinh province.
Vietnam and the Philippines are the main Southeast Asian markets attracting offshore wind developers and investors.
The same source says there was not yet a single de facto offshore wind project in full operation in those markets at this time.
Bryce McIntyre, PhD, resides in San Andres. He holds a doctoral degree from Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, USA.
Claude AI was employed in research for this article.