With the completion of the south transmission line in Negros Occidental, Aboitiz Power Corporation said its Carlos Sun Power Inc. (SacaSun) has already started doubling its capacity feed to the Visayas power grid.
In a briefing with reporters, Aboitiz Power President and CEO Emmanuel V. Rubio emphasized that the facility was able to “operate additional inverters and raised its output by another 23 megawatts.” By far, that maximized the plant’s generating capacity to 46 megawatts.
The solar facility has an installed capacity of 59 MWp and was completed in March 2016. It serves as the first utility-scale, ground mounted solar PV installation of the Aboitiz group.
The plant’s electricity generation has been constricted for years because of transmission capacity congestion in that part of the Visayas grid. Hence, it became a dilemma for many solar power projects in the area.
“SacaSun was constrained and without this line, we’re only able to deliver 50 percent of its capacity – as it is now energized, completed, we’re able to evacuate full capacity of SacaSun being a must-dispatch,” Rubio said.
Aside from the SacaSun solar facility, the Aboitiz group has also been achieving milestones leading to the commercial operation of its two-phased 1,336MW GNPower Dinginin coal-fired power project in Mariveles, Bataan.
He said the plant’s generating unit 1 with 668MW installed capacity has started running on March 22. As of March 26, it already reached 600MW level of generation.
“In the past few weeks, we have already synchronized but we took an outage for some adjustments for about one-and-half weeks. And there's still a lot of tuning to be done, it takes some time – a long way to go to declare COD (commercial operation date) but at least, with that capacity, we’re keeping prices at lower levels given the significant outage in the grid,” Rubio expounded.
The Aboitiz Power chief executive added “we expect this to continue and hopefully, we’ll remain online up to the reliability run… not yet to the full capacity, because we expect to get 668MW, but we are now above 600MW.”
The Dinginin plant is a new capacity addition to the Luzon grid, with its unit 2 of similar 668MW capacity, eyeing to be advanced to commercial operation by next year.
Given the simultaneous outages in power facilities in recent weeks, it has been emphasized that the capacity feed of the new Dinginin plant had been critical because it was able to shore up supply and subsequently helped in softening prices in the electricity spot market.
As most Filipinos are consigned to work-from-home arrangements and with students on online distance learning, the Department of Energy (DOE) has directed power firms to ensure that their facilities will continually deliver service to consumers in these critical times.