The Energy Development Corporation (EDC) will be spending P7-billion for the last wave of its rehabilitation program for its aging plants for the improvement of reliability and generating capacities by 2018.

Most of the capital expenditure this year will be allotted for the rehabilitation of the 112.5 – megawatt (MW) Tongonan geothermal plant in Leyte, EDC president and COO Richard Tantoco said.

“That’s our major capex this year. Our capex is about P7 billion. Around P3 billion will be for Tongonan,” Tantoco said.

The two units of the Tongnan plant will shut down for 110 consecutive days.

“But then, there’s change in the whole turbines, some of the foundations, everything. So our drilling cost in the future and our work over cost are going to contract, it will have an increase output by 10 MW, decrease in steam consumption by nine percent,” Tantoco said.

He added that the retrofit of the two units are on track and set to be completed by the third quarter. “After the retrofit, it will be as good as new and we expect an increase of up to 10 percent in its total capacity.”

EDC is also set to optimize its 125-MW Upper Mahiao geothermal plant this year with a budget of P400 – 500 million, EDC vice president for corporate finance Erwin Avante said.

Tantoco said that the plant’s turbines will be replaced with newer metallurgy.

“The first one is in, the second one has gone in, third and fourth are arriving October and in March next year. That will be much much higher chrome, some titanium. We expect those machines to be really robust going forward,” he said.

The efficiency upgrade reliability improvement came after the company lost P600 million in opportunity cost following the tripping of the Tongonan plant two years ago, and the Upper Mahiao plant last year.

“Within this year or next year, you’ll see generation getting better. But you will really have everything kicking in on a full year basis in 2018. This is a transition year with a lot of outages,” Tantoco said.