(The Philippine Star) | Updated May 24, 2013 - 12:00am
MANILA, Philippines - AboitizPower, the holding company for the Aboitiz Group’s power generation, distribution and retail businesses, has raised its planned investment in the power sector to P125 billion from a previous announcement of P85 billion, its top official said.
In a press briefing yesterday, AboitizPower president and chief executive officer Erramon Aboitiz said over the next five years, the company expects to invest P125 billion in various projects to double its capacity to 3,500 megawatts.
“What we are seeing this year is growth in all sectors. AboitizPower will be investing about P125 billion to build new power plants over the next five years, bringing out attributable capacity to roughly 3,500 MW,” Aboitiz said.
The amount represents AboitizPower’s investments in RP Energy’s 600-MW plant in Subic, the 400-MW Pagbilao 3 coal-fired plant expansion, the 300-MW Therma South coal plant in Mindanao and an additional coal plant in Cebu.
RP Energy is a consortium of AboitizPower, PowerGen Corp. and Taiwan Cogeneration International Corp.
For the Pagbilao 3 expansion, AboitizPower has teamed up with TeaM Energy Corp.
AboitizPower is also investing in three to four hydropower plants.
“We have also 150 or so megawatts of small run-of-river hydros that we are developing,” Aboitiz said.
A portion of the P125 billion would also go to new power plants in Mindanao, which the company hopes to build within the next three years to help address the power shortage in the island.
AboitizPower’s wholly-owned subsidiary Therma South Inc., meanwhile, is completing a 300-MW coal power plant in Mindanao and expects this to be ready by early 2015.
To raise the funding requirements, Aboitiz said the company would do a combination of loans and equity financing.
“Normally what we do in projects like this is we get some project financing from the banks of about 70 percent and the balance is the equity that we put in as AboitizPower,” he said.
Aboitiz expressed optimism on the improving economic environment, saying this would be good for business.
“With growth in the economy we experienced in the first quarter, we can expect the demand for power to go up. This is good for generation and distribution business,” Aboitiz said.
In the first quarter of the year, AboitizPower reported a 22 percent drop in first quarter earnings, mainly due to lower ancillary power sales to the National Grid Corp. of the Philippines (NGCP), the country’s power transmission highway operator.
AboitizPower said its first quarter earnings declined to P4 billion from P5.1 billion a year ago. source
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