San Buenaventura Power Ltd Co., a joint venture between Meralco PowerGen Corp. (MGen) and Thailand’s EGCO Group, will reportedly bring over a billion pesos to Meralco this year.
SBPL’s operations contributed around P300 million to Meralco’s core net income at the end of 2019, as reported in a BusinessMirror article.
MGen President Rogelio Singson said they expect that the 455 MW supercritical coal-fired power plant will post the same amount every quarter this year.
The plant began its operations on September 26 last year in Mauban, Quezon. It provided 852M-gigawatt hours (GWh) of energy to Meralco at an average plant availability of 87 percent as of the end of 2019. This has eased supply within the franchise area as around 630 MW of plant capacities went into maintenance shutdown for almost 10 days in the last quarter of 2019.
“We’ve had some hiccups early January but we were able to address immediately. We have technicians, experts in boiler, boiler tuning that have been addressed. We hope the solution is nothing major but boiler tuning,” Singson said.
“We have contributed to the bottom line of Meralco of about P300 million, completed the project a little below budget and on schedule. We are happy with the outcome of the project and our partners are also happy with the project,” he added.
Meanwhile, Meralco president Ray C. Espinosa commented on the good performance of the plan by saying, “We are extremely happy.”
SBPL utilizes a high-efficiency, low-emission (HELE) coal technology.
Singson explained that this could decrease carbon dioxide emissions and improve the efficiency of the power plant by producing more energy with less coal.
“Significant advances in coal-fired power plant technology demonstrate that we do not have to choose between affordable and reliable electricity or a cleaner environment,” he said. “As a pioneer of this technology, SBPL is setting the bar higher in operating coal plants in the Philippines,” he added.