Planted Raises $31.8 Million to Scale Autonomous Solar Robots

Energy Minister Eknat Prompan, speaking on the program "Talk with the Anutin Cabinet," outlined the direction of the country's energy structural reform through a new Power Development Plan, or PDP, built on three core principles: clean, secure, and fair. One key policy is the push for a people's solar project with total generating capacity of 10,000 megawatts, with this capacity reserved for the public and an installation size of about 5 kilowatts per household so that generating capacity does not concentrate among large operators, giving people the chance to produce their own electricity and sell surplus power back into the system to offset their bills. On funding, a solar system costs about 140,000 baht per system, and the Energy Ministry proposes helping with a down payment of 50,000 baht, leaving a burden of about 90,000 baht, while opening the way to seek loans from financial institutions. For the industrial sector, the government is pressing ahead with opening a direct clean power trading market, or Direct PPA, on a broader scale, with the National Energy Policy Council having approved guidelines to unlock Direct PPA to cover both data centers and industrial sectors that need clean electricity. As for measures to ease household power costs, the government is restructuring the electricity tariff by separating the public electricity cost from ordinary users' bills, along with a progressive tariff under which the first 200 units of electricity use are charged no more than 3 baht per unit, starting from the September 2026 billing cycle. Meanwhile, the new PDP will open the way to further study alternative energy and technologies, including hydrogen, geothermal energy, fuel cells, and small modular nuclear reactors, or SMRs, to prepare regulatory criteria, safety standards, and infrastructure for future technologies.

The equity and derivatives market strategist at InnovestX Research, InnovestX Securities, said efforts to push Thailand as a regional data center hub are taking clearer shape after the first meeting of the Data Center Business Policy Committee resolved to accelerate integration of data and legal provisions into a single dashboard, in order to set a clear industrial strategic framework within one month. The criteria define data centers using more than 2 MW of electricity as industrial businesses, set resource utilization fees to reflect true direct and indirect costs, and impose strict energy conditions to support Green Data Centers, including a separate electricity tariff category for the group, a mandatory clean energy share of no less than 60% to meet Net Zero goals, and tighter standards for backup power systems. Four subcommittees will be set up covering the economy, infrastructure, land and buildings, and the environment to draw up technical standards, and decisive measures are being prepared to suspend water and electricity allocation for projects not yet under construction if they fail the criteria. InnovestX assesses that these clearer policies will create significant positive ripple effects for two main industries. The first is clean energy, where the 60% minimum clean energy requirement will turn clean power from an option into a necessity, sharply driving real demand. The second is industrial estates, where classifying data centers as industrial businesses will draw foreign direct investment, or FDI, into leading estates equipped with smart grid networks and environmental management, leaving estates reliant on fossil fuels far behind. The investment strategy therefore recommends Selective Buy, focusing on accumulating leaders in these two main industries. For industrial estates, it favors companies with stable smart grid networks sufficient for Tier 3-4 data centers, joint ventures with multinational technology firms, and their own water recycling management systems, namely AMATA and WHA. For clean energy, it favors companies making progress on direct power purchase agreements, or Direct PPAs, with global hyperscalers, with high ESG scores and green certificates, and investing in battery energy storage systems, or BESS, to maintain the stability of electricity supplied to data centers, namely GULF, GPSC and BGRIM, as well as GUNKUL, a contractor for high-voltage transmission line systems.