Meralco PowerGen Corporation (MGen), the power generation investment arm of Manila Electric Company (Meralco), is seeking certification from the Department of Energy (DOE) as it is now inclined to rejoin the country’s ‘king coal club’ for its 1,200-megawatt Atimonan power plant project that will be equipped with ultra-supercritical (USC) technology.

MGen President and CEO Emmanuel V. Rubio told reporters that “we’re trying to get a DOE certification that is really outside the moratorium,” in reference to a policy set forth in 2020 that put a brake on new coal plant installations.

Under the coal moratorium, projects that already started with permitting or have already achieved considerable milestones in their development cycles are excluded in the policy enforcement.

Meralco Chairman Manuel V. Pangilinan emphasized that the investment trajectory for the blueprinted Atimonan facility is for coal-fired generation, in lieu of earlier plans to shift to a liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility.

“We’re evaluating…the inclination is to stay with coal. Right now, it (Atimonan project) is licensed, permitted and thorough authorized to be a coal plant: ultra-supercritical,” he stressed.

Ultra-supercritical boiler for coal plants, in particular, is touted as a cutting-edge technology that could burn less coal in a more efficient way in electricity generation processes, hence, emissions are seen to be of lower levels compared to the traditional technologies.

Pangilinan qualified that based on their assessment, the business imperative points to coal as the better option, because a switch to gas technology will require added installations into the equation, such as import terminal and regas facilities that will have cost impact on consumers; and there is also tendency for the targeted capacity to be pared below 1,200MW.

“I don’t know if that is the right place to put up a gas complex, but the inclination is to stay with coal,” the Meralco chairman reiterated.

Rubio expounded that while there was initial plan to repurpose the project to a gas-fed power facility, the Atimonan project has been classified as ‘committed’ in the DOE roll, hence he noted that “it is outside the moratorium.”

At its pre-development phase, Rubio conveyed that MGen as sponsor-firm has already secured the environmental compliance certificate (ECC) -- and the next steps for their team upon securing the DOE certification would be to secure system impact study (SIS) from the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) and to proceed with engineering study.

Coal plant developments globally are often regarded as an investment bargain on the dark side, and widely perceived as a tone-deaf betrayal of global efforts to abate climate risks that are now endangering humanity’s survival.

Nevertheless, in the case of the Philippines which is recurrently plagued by very wobbly power supply situation, a number of power developers have been trotting out the ‘energy security argument’ as part of their trump card into the energy transition pathway.

It must also be recalled that most banks and other financing institutions already shun capital formation for coal plant projects, but it is interesting to see how these new coal plants could be packaged for project financing; and who among the lenders would backpedal on earlier pronouncements.