The Manila Electric Co. (Meralco) said its power generation arm, Meralco PowerGen Corp. (MGen) is open to pursuing nuclear power projects.
But the company said it is in talks with an American firm for the venture.
“During the visit of the President to the (United) States, some of our people met with two nuclear manufacturing plants and one of them visited us here in Meralco about two to three months ago. It was a very productive visit and one of the things we wanted to do with them is to first send a team to Seattle and to University of Illinois where they have a working plant in campus and see how it operates,” said Manuel Pangilinan, Meralco chairman and chief executive officer, in a briefing early this week.
Pangilinan said Meralco eyes to “have a taste” of the technology via a pilot project.
“(We) suggested to them that if we could actually buy or we could buy and build a pilot plant here in the Philippines so at least we could have a taste of how it looks, how we can build it and how we can operate it. So, that’s in progress. We still have to schedule those trips to the States and coordinate with them to get that going,” Pangilinan said.
Meralco’s overall power generation capacity through MGen and Global Business Power Corp. is over 2,400 MW that utilize coal, liquified natural gas, diesel and solar technologies.
