February 12, 2016 10:23 pm by VOLTAIRE PALAÑA
CONSTRUCTION of the
country’s first supercritical coal-fired power plant is already underway in
Quezon and should start providing efficient and reliable baseload power supply
by the first half of 2019.
San Buenaventura
Power Ltd. (SBPL) is building a 500-MW (gross) supercritical coal-fired power
plant in the town of Mauban in Quezon Province.
“The power plant will
be the first in the country to use state-of-the art supercritical technology,
which is more efficient than all [other] existing coal plants in the
Philippines,” the company said.
Compared to
subcritical power plants, supercritical coal-fired power plants operate at
higher pressures, leading to higher efficiencies and significant reductions in
emissions over the expected life of the plant.
The 500-MW power
plant is being built by the consortium of South Korea’s Daelim Industrial Co.
Ltd. and Japan’s Mitsubishi Corp., both experienced engineering, procurement
and construction contractors.
SBPL is 51 percent
owned by Meralco PowerGen Corporation (MGen) and 49 percent by New Growth B.V.
The electricity
generated by SBPL’s plant will be sold to Meralco under a 20-year power supply
agreement that was approved by the Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) in May
2015.
The SBPL plant forms
part of MGen’s goal to build a power generation portfolio of up to 3,000 MW as
Meralco moves to be a major industry player not only in the distribution but
also in the Philippines’ generation sector.
Meanwhile, SBPL was
recently awarded the “Asia-Pacific Power Deal of the Year” award by the Thomson
Reuters Project Finance International (PFI).
SBPL was recognized
after it closed a landmark P42.15-billion funding, which is the Philippines’
largest all-peso project finance transaction to date.
The project finance
was put together by a consortium of Philippine financial institutions. In the
past, similar deals would require support from foreign banks or multilateral
export credit agencies due to the local banks’ limitation on debt size and
tenor.
The senior-term loan
lenders are BDO Unibank, Inc.; China Banking Corp. (Chinabank); Metropolitan
Bank & Trust Co. (Metrobank); Philippine National Bank (PNB); and Rizal
Commercial Banking Corp.
BDO Unibank’s Trust
and Investments Group served as the loan facility agent while Metrobank’s Trust
Banking Group acted as collateral trustee.
BDO Capital &
Investment Corp. and First Metro Investment Corp. were appointed as joint
bookrunners and joint issue coordinators. Together with Chinabank, PNB Capital
and Investment Corp. and RCBC Capital Corp., they also acted as joint lead
arrangers for the transaction.
The project finance
has a tenor of 15 years, which is the longest maturity that Philippine banks
can provide. It has no corporate or government guarantee even with the sizeable
amount but SBPL is backed by Meralco and Thailand’s Electricity Generating
Public Co. Ltd. (EGCO).
MGen is a wholly
owned subsidiary of Meralco, the Philippines’ largest electricity distributor,
while New Growth B.V. is a wholly owned subsidiary of the EGCO Group, a regional
utility with over 3,800 MW of operational and 1,800 MW power plants in
construction throughout Southeast Asia.
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