By
Lenie Lectura- August 27, 2019
THE country’s first
coal-fired power plant to use supercritical technology is on track for
commercial operation next month.
Meralco PowerGen (MGen)
President Rogelio Singson said the 455-megawatt (MW) supercritical coal-fired
power plant in Mauban, Quezon of San Buenaventura Power Ltd. (SBPL) is at
99.79-percent EPC (engineering, procurement, construction) accomplishment.
“We are still on COD
[commercial operation date] target of September 15 or sooner for the SBPL. Now,
the plant is on full load operations, meaning it is operating at 500 MW.
“In the next few days
we are doing some performance tests with NGCP, as well as reliability tests
before we are able to finally commission and say the plant is fully operational
and we expect that to happen on or before September 15 this year,” said
Singson.
MGen, the
power-generation arm of Meralco, expects full positive results by end
2020.
“We are still hopeful
that we can commission this sooner than the target schedule. So far, everything
looks good; happy with our EPC contractor and happy with support given to us by
our partner in the project,” added Singson.
SBPL is a
partnership between MGen and New Growth BV, a wholly owned subsidiary of
Electricity Generating Public Co. Ltd. (EGCO Group) of Thailand.
The electricity to be
generated by the P56.2-billion plant will be sold to Meralco, the country’s
largest distribution utility, under a 20-year power-supply agreement. This
project would bring in additional revenues to Meralco in 2020.
The plant’s capacity
and energy are contracted to Meralco, pursuant to a 20-year
power-supply agreement which is extendable for up to an additional five years.
The SBPL power plant
will play a crucial role as electricity demand grows, especially in Luzon which
accounts for about 70 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.
“Power generation will
be our game changer. We are looking forward to September this year when Meralco
finally reenters baseload power generation and can better assure customers in
its strategic franchise area adequate, reliable and affordable power supply
after our 455-MW SBPL coal plant comes on stream,” said Singson.
The company tapped the
consortium of Daelim Industrial Co. Ltd. and Mitsubishi Corp. as the EPC
contractor for the project.
SBPL achieved financial
close for the power project in December 2015 for a total debt of P42.1 billion.
No comments:
Post a Comment