Greenfield as well as expansion generating facilities of Aboitiz Power Corporation will be shoring up power supply in the country this year by additional 400 megawatts – mainly coming from its solar plants that will be reaching commercial stream in the months ahead.

In a briefing with reporters, Aboitiz Power President and CEO Emmanuel V. Rubio indicated that new capacities from their solar projects in Pangasinan and Tarlac could bring in capacity additions starting the second quarter of this year and onwards.

The 75MW Cayanga solar plant in Pangasinan, in particular, will potentially be received by the company in the second quarter – with the guaranteed operational parameters that it had mandated with its engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contractor.

“Initially when we generated, the performance parameters were not met, so there were adjustments needed in the inverters and the panels. So now, it is already going well within the guaranteed parameters. I think it will be accepted soon, hopefully March,” he said.

Rubio explained it is very essential that the operational parameters of a plant being turned over are strictly within prescribed specifications, otherwise, these could be prone to damage of the equipment as well as recurring forced outages that can compromise supply in the power grid.

The biggest of the Aboitiz solar farms coming on-line would be the development of its subsidiary, Aboitiz Renewables Inc. (ARI), that is sited in Calatrava, Negros Occidental with 172.7MW capacity.

Further supply reinforcements will also be provided by the power firm’s 44MW Armenia solar installation in Tarlac; as well as its 17MW geothermal binary plant in Tiwi, Albay.

For the Negros solar facility, Rubio stated that the capacity wheeling of the plant’s generation would already be eased with the completion of the 230-kilovolt Magdugo substation of the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) that is sited in Cebu.

Apart from its facilities that are already at commissioning phases or undergoing construction completion, the Aboitiz Power executive conveyed that the third unit expansion of their Therma Visayas Inc. (TVI)  power generation will already be advanced with 150MW capacity as cast on blueprint.

He noted that the company presented at least three options to the Department of Energy (DOE) for the planned expansion – including coal-fired power generation, as well as solar and liquefied natural gas (LNG) technologies, but what still came out as most economically viable and technologically feasible would be a coal plant expansion.

“If DoE will allow us to build it because of the moratorium, but from the start, TVI-3 already have that permit because it is part of the original design of the TVI. We already have an ECC (environmental compliance certificate). If we are going to be strict about it, it should be outside the moratorium, we asked DoE for a certification and we got that,” he expounded.

Rubio added “we are now developing that. We are looking for financing and it looks like we can get financing. We presented to the provincial government, it was welcomed by the Governor because of the Panay (blackout) issue, they are welcoming generation in the island,” emphasizing that even the Cebu Chamber of Commerce and Industry had also given the green light on the project’s development.