AboitizPower seeks guidance for Cebu project

MANILA, Philippines — Aboitiz Power Corp. will seek the Department of Energy (DOE)’s guidance on which technology should be used for its planned 150-megawatt (MW) power plant in Cebu.

AboitizPower president and chief executive officer Emmanuel Rubio said among the options being considered is for the power plant to run on either liquefied natural gas (LNG) or coal.

“Cebu needs capacity. On a day to day basis, a number of diesel plants are still running in Cebu. So that means that baseload capacity is short,” Rubio said.

“It’s not that power is not available. It’s that expensive plants are running so they need to be displaced by cheaper technologies,” he said.

In terms of renewable energy resource, there’s not much available in Cebu, according to the executive.

For coal, Rubio said the group must first take a look whether they can still finance such project or if it can be insured.

“But certainly, it’s outside the moratorium because it has ECC (environmental compliance certificate). It has all the permits so that we can actually build it if we want to. But we don’t just want to build it, we just want to make sure that we justify it if we’re going to use that option,” Rubio said.

Rubio said the company wants to make sure first that there would be DOE acceptance and support on the proposed project, whichever way it goes.

“We have been presenting this to the DOE. This is LNG, this is coal, how do you want us to proceed? So at the end of the day, we really have to balance everything and we need to provide the most optimum solution to the Cebuanos,” he said.

Rubio said the company expects Cebu to need the new baseload capacity by 2026 or 2027 at the earliest.

AboitizPower thermal power generation group chief operating officer Felino Bernardo earlier said that while the Aboitiz Group and the country as a whole are pushing for the growth of renewable energy, other types of technology are still needed.

Bernardo said baseload power remains the cheapest source of electricity at present.

“We still need thermal baseload. But in the long run, we have to plan for transition. So the inefficient plants, it should be replaced with more efficient plants and most likely it will be LNG-to-power,” he said.

The AboitizPower thermal business group manages and operates the thermal power generation assets of AboitizPower.  Its coal and oil assets provide much needed baseload power to the Philippine grid.