Biomass, wind projects for green city

BANI, Pangasinan , Philippines  – This second-class town took two steps towards its goal of becoming a Green City by 2020 with two environment-friendly projects.

Mayor Marcelo Navarro Jr. announced that Global Tech of Spain has released 190,000 euros for the feasibility study of a biomass-fired cogeneration plant, the first of its kind in the country. 

This company, through its local partner Philippine Bioscience Company Inc. (PHILBIO), is set to establish a P1-billion five-megawatt (MW) cogeneration plant with the construction of two silos, each as high as a three-storey building, that would provide grain drying facilities and produce biomass energy. 

This will be a rice mill and cogeneration plant with a state-of-the art rice mill complex that will integrate silo-type palay grain drying and storage facility and sufficient warehousing for the milled rice. 

The minimum capacity of the rice mill complex of 500 tons per day will be designed to service the palay production of the entire District 1 of Pangasinan, estimated to be 148,000 tons of palay annually. 

The biomass-fired cogeneration plant will utilize rice hull and rice straw as primary fuel to produce electricity. 

Meanwhile, More Energy, which established itself in the Philippines with Nippon Steel of Japan, will put up a windmill project in Barangay Olanen which can generate 30 MW of electricity.

Navarro said this is the first in the country using this technology from Japan called World First Cylinders with Spiral Magnus model. Electricity from the 20 towers can power the entire town, Navarro said. 

Company officials are set to return here to discuss the establishment of an ice plant to be powered by wind energy, a livelihood component of the project. The windmill will be built under a build-operate-transfer scheme while the ice plant is a grant. 

Pangasinan is already host to the 1,200 MW coal-fired power plant in Sual town and the 345 MW plant at the San Roque dam in San Manuel town that provides power to the Luzon grid.