Decreasing costs of solar energy technology are leading Siam Cement Group (SCG) to focus more on the solar power business under its Onnex brand, in a bid to increase power generation capacity to 1,000 megawatts between 2025 and 2029.
The company's capacity is currently 200MW, including electricity supplied by its solar farm in Saraburi, spanning 47.5 rai of land.
"Onnex has new solar projects in the pipeline with a combined capacity of 400-500MW," said Wachirachai Koonamwattana, head of the living solutions business at SCG Smart Living, a unit under SCG.
SCG Smart Living operates the solar energy solutions business under the Onnex brand.
The new projects include solar farms, floating solar farms and carports, said Mr Wachirachai.
Carports are car parks that use rooftop solar panels to generate electricity.
The costs of technology and equipment installations for solar energy are declining, he said.
People are also interested in installing more rooftop solar panels at their homes to avoid paying high electricity bills to the state grid, said Mr Wachirachai.
Households typically use kilowatt-scale rooftop solar panels. A large house with installed capacity of 7-10KW pays between 300,000 and 500,000 baht for the equipment, according to media reports. The cost of solar farm development is 20 million baht per megawatt, while building a solar carport requires 28 million baht per megawatt.
Onnex's business is growing, with the internal rate of return reaching 34%, said Suchart Nokputsa, associate director for rooftop solar panels at SCG Smart Living.
SCG wants to strengthen its solar power business in the domestic market first before expanding overseas, especially in the Philippines, where the government is promoting renewable energy investment.
"Thailand has high demand for solar energy, following more investment in deep tech-related businesses, including data centres and cloud services," said Dusit Chairat, director for smart home living solutions at SCG Smart Living.
The company said foreign data centre operators interested in investing in Thailand want clean energy to support their facilities.