Pact inked for coal-fired plant in Toledo

CEBU, Philippines - AboitizPower will be building a 340-megawatt coal-fired power plant in Toledo City.

Therma Visayas, Inc., (TVI), a wholly owned subsidiary of Aboitiz Power Corp. (AboitizPower), signed an engineering procurement and construction (EPC) contract with Hyundai Engineering Co., LTD and Ga-ling Power Energy Co., Inc. to start the P41 billion project in Barangay Bato.

 TVI will be issuing a limited Notice to Proceed to perform design engineering and detailed physical data collection to prepare for construction.

The plant will have a net capacity baseload of 300 megawatts. The project’s generating equipment will consist of 2x170 MW Steam turbines and 2 Circulating Fluidized Bed (CFB) boilers.

“We look forward to working closely on this project with our EPC contractor and the local community to ensure we deliver a quality power plant on time. This project will assure Cebuanos that we will have adequate and competitively priced baseload power supply in the island by 2017. This is a very important project for the Visayas grid,” Erramon I. Aboitiz, AboitizPower Chief Executive Officer, said in a statement.

The Department of Energy projects that 2016 to 2018 will be a critical period for the Visayas grid and the TVI project is being expedited to meet this looming power deficit. AboitizPower is also currently working toward Financial Close with local financing institutions.

TVI is targeted to go online by the third quarter of 2017. The project is expected to create over 1,500 new jobs during construction and about 150 new permanent jobs during operation.

Earlier, DOE-Visayas Field Office Director Antonio Labios said the Visayas grid’s installed capacity of 2,402 megawatts (MW) is enough to meet its peak demand of 1,489 MW for now.

Based on its August 2012 monitoring data, Cebu has the biggest demand at 707 MW during peak hours followed by Panay with 262, Negros with 247; Leyte-Samar with 210, and Bohol, 63.

Labios said the power situation in Panay Island has improved with the additional supply of 164 MW from PEDC. The additional supply of 200MW from Kepco and 246 MW from CEDC has also helped solved the power shortage problem in Cebu.

The Visayas region’s power demand is projected to increase to 1,594 MW in 2013; 1,651 in 2014; and 1,711 MW in 2015.

From 2,402 MW this year, its installed capacity will increase to 2032 MW in 2013 with the operation of 8 MW Villasiga HEP, to 2052 in 2014 with the operation of the 20 MW Nasulo Geothermal Power Plant and to 2,056 MW in 2015 with the additional 4MW from Asian Energy Biomass.

Robert Go, director of the Philippine Retailers Association-Cebu Chapter, said earlier that a power plant is a “must-do” project.

“We will have brownouts like Mindanao if we don’t put it up. We will have higher electricity rates if there is a shortage and again we will use band-aid solution of using the diesel-fired power plants which cost too much and will increase rates. Increasing our power supply is always the balancer,” Go said.

Go cited that the business processing and outsourcing needs a 24-hour continuous power supply.

“Any brownout will be a blackeye. It will drive away investors,” he said further. – with Mitchelle L. Palaubsanon/JMO (FREEMAN)