Published April 17, 2018, 10:00 PM By Myrna M.
Velasco
La Paz , Iloilo City – Global
Business Power Corporation (GBP) is scaling up its targeted renewable energy
(RE) investments by roughly three-fold to 300-megawatts from previously at a
leaner 100-150MW.
Of such investments on blueprint,
Global Power President Jaime T. Azurin noted that about 150 megawatts shall be
hydro pumped storage; 50 megawatts of solar and the rest shall be biomass and
other technologies.
This will form part of the 1,500MW
medium-term power generation portfolio target of the company – that it also
hopes to ramp up to 2,000 megawatts within the stretch of five years.
He emphasized that of investments
already cast, about 20-percent of the total capacity installation shall
comprise of RE technologies.
“Out of 300 megawatts, the target is
150MW for pumped storage, it has to be big enough to address primary and
secondary needs for ancillary services, so at least it should be 150
megawatts,” Azurin expounded. Targeted site is in Visayas grid.
For the planned solar installations
that shall also be underpinned by the newly crafted Renewable Portfolio
Standards (RPS) for the RE sector, the Global Power executive noted that
development shall be as much as 50 megawatts.
He hinted that the site shall be in
Luzon for at least the 45MW fraction of the planned ground-mounted
installation; while 5.0MW shall be at an area proximate to the company’s power
plant site in Iloilo City.
“For solar to make it viable, it is
50MW per farm,” Azurin said, adding that the Iloilo utility-scale solar farm
“is part and parcel of our commitment to the city.”
On the portended biomass projects,
the company executive added that they are lining this up for incentive scheme
under the extended feed-in-tariff (FIT) being dangled for this technology
He stressed that for them to be
qualified in the installation cap, they are calculatedly planning completion of
their biomass projects by year 2019.
Azurin opined their company will be
joining the RPS-backed project development bandwagon with ‘the concept of
sustainability’ into the core – and this entails not just providing power
requirements to consumers but also injecting reliability into power grids.
For the propounded hydro pumped
storage, the equivalent investment was pegged at US$3.0 million per megawatt or
US$450 million for the entire targeted capacity; while for solar, the
rule-of-thumb investment cost has been set at US$800,000 to US$1.0 million per
megawatt (or about US$50 million aggregate).
“Our definition of ‘sustainable’ is
reduction of fossil fuels with the use of renewables, second is stability,” he
reiterated.
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