By MST Business | Nov. 16, 2014 at 11:30pm
First Gen Corp. plans to directly offer the capacity of the proposed 414-megawatt Santa Maria natural gas plant to distribution utilities such as Manila Electric Co., instead of selling its output to the wholesale electricity spot market as a merchant plant.
“We’re working on Santa Maria right now. We have to make a decision next year if we want it online for March 2017,” First Gen president Francis Giles Puno told reporters.
“We can’t do it merchant. We’re offering it to the market and it can be a timely investment to meet additional supply requirements by 2017,” he said.
A merchant plant operates without power supply contracts, banking on the wholesale electricity spot market, the country’s trading floor of electricity as its main market.
The Santa Maria natural gas plant will be an expansion of the ongoing 414-MW San Gabriel natural gas plant that is expected for completion by 2016.
First Gen already signed a $265-million export credit facility with KfW IPEX-Bank of Germany to partly finance the San Gabriel plant construction.
“When we started San Gabriel, we thought there was oversupply. It’s very difficult to build power plants. Fortunately for us, we can build quicker than coal plants. Because of the tight supply this year, we’ve decided to go ahead,” Puno said earlier.
Puno said First Gen would also likely tap KfW to finance the Sta. Rita project.
The KfW financing for the San Gabriel plant carries a tenor of 13.7 years and will partially finance the 414-MW San Gabriel natural gas-fired power project which has a total project cost of $550 million to $600 million. source
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