MAUBAN, Quezon Province — San Buenaventura Power Ltd. Co. inaugurated yesterday the Philippines’ first supercritical coal-fired power plant here with a gross capacity of 500 megawatts (MW).
The project is a partnership between Meralco PowerGen Corp. (MGen) and New Growth BV, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Electricity Generating Co. of Thailand.
With a cost of P56.2 billion, the project was partly funded by a P42.15-billion project finance facility, which was considered as the Philippines’ largest all-peso transaction to date that was put together by a consortium of local banks.
Rogelio Singson, MGen president and chief executive officer, said the power plant is also currently the country’s most advanced operational coal plant using a high efficiency, low emission coal technology that allows the plant to operate at increasingly higher temperatures and pressures to reach higher efficiencies, while significantly reducing emissions.
The project was built by the consortium of South Korea’s Daelim Industrial Co. Ltd. and Japan’s Mitsubishi Corp. which are both experienced engineering, procurement and construction contractors with very strong track records.
MGen said the facility has the technology capable of reducing emissions of other pollutants like nitrogen oxides, sulphur dioxide and particulate matter. It will also be equipped with flue-gas desulfurization, electrostatic precipitator and other anti-pollution devices.
The company added the host community will benefit financially from the power plant as it will have an average annual real property tax of P240 million and P100 million worth of local business tax.
The community will also earn 1 centavo per kilowatt hour of generated sales of the project or an estimated P30 million per year.
Apart from high efficiency coal plants, MGen through its renewable energy development arm MGEN Renewable Energy Inc. secured earlier this month a P424-million equity funding that will be used to invest in various solar projects under development with a combined capacity of 210 MW and total combined project cost of P10 billion.
