Published July 17, 2017, 10:00 PM By Myrna M.
Velasco
Listed firm Vivant Corporation of
the Garcia group is seen joining the three-tiered partnership that will be
advancing the development of the 670-megawatt super critical coal-fired power
project in La Union province.
The project is currently led by
Global Business Power Corporation (GBPC) and had initially engaged Meralco
PowerGen (MGen) for a tie-up, power generation companies both under the charge
of business magnate Manuel V. Pangilinan.
According to sources privy to
on-going discussions among the prospective partners, Vivant is “a
strategic choice” because it already has its presence in La Union via the
215-MW Bauang thermal plant.
The equity arrangement, it was
further noted, would be more or less “equal among all three partners” in the
project “at the range of 30-percent plus each.”
When asked on the matter, GBPC
President Jaime T. Azurin indicated that there is a third partner being tapped
into the project, but he has not named it directly for now. Instead, he just
asserted that “announcement will be made once transaction terms are finalized.”
The La Union project will be sited
in a barangay along Luna municipality. It would be a two-phased installation at
335MW capacity each.
The project’s electricity generation
had been underwritten by a power supply agreement (PSA) that is still pending
for approval by the Energy Regulatory Commission.
On a per megawatt cost rule-of-thumb
of US$2.5 million for the proposed facility, GBPC and partners will be
investing US$1.675 billion or roughly P83.75 billion, likely in the 75:25
debt-to-equity ratio.
Azurin said they are now at the
process of securing the project’s environmental compliance certificate (ECC),
although he qualified that relative to the process, they have been waiting for
some clarifications on how to go along with this permitting phase following the
issuance of Executive Order 30 by President Rodrigo Duterte on the declaration
of energy projects to be of ‘national significance’ that essentially
streamlines and harmonizes systems of energy project approvals.
The next major steps in their to-do
list would be tapping the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC)
contractor and then the project’s financial closing. “We currently have six (6)
in our shortlist for the EPC contract,” he said, but this will only move
headway once the proposed facility’s power supply deal would secure regulatory
approval.
Azurin intimated that the company’s
vision “is to increase our current capacity to 1,500-2,000MW within the next
five years,” and the La Union project would be one valuable addition to that
goal.
“Now that we’ve secured the baseload
requirements of Visayas, we are now ready to expand outside of the region.
Central to this goal is the development of the supercritical facility in La
Union,” he stressed.
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