By Myrna M. Velasco

With Luzon grid still strained with tight supply dilemma, the commercial fruition of the San Buenaventura power facility to its full load capacity of 500 megawatts is a highly beneficial addition to the main power grid’s supply.

San Buenaventura Power Ltd. Co. (SBPL) reported that the newly commissioned power plant has reached full load that had been dispatched at 500MW on Friday (May 24) in the afternoon.

Operating firm SBPL is a joint venture of New Growth B.V., a wholly owned subsidiary of Electricity Generating Public Company Limited (EGCO) of Thailand; and Meralco PowerGen, the power generation investment arm of Manila Electric Company.

“The unit reached supercritical steam pressure conditions of 221 bar, and full output load at 500MW TMCR (turbine maximum continuous rating) on Friday afternoon,” SBPL General Manager Frank Thiel has disclosed.

TMCR would refer to the maximum work output that a turbine could generate, which in the case of the San Buenaventura plant, is set at 500MW – including house load and the maximum capacity wheeled to the grid. That was also essentially going beyond the plant’s nameplate capacity at 455MW.

Thiel added the plant is now moving closer “to achieving its full commercial operations status,” which the project developer firm targets to clock in by September this year.

“The unit is currently running at its most efficient point, and with low emissions as a result. We are pretty elated with this accomplishment,” the SBPL executive stressed.

The plant will help satisfy the long-term supply portfolio of Meralco, as the project’s capacity has been committed to it under a 20-year power supply agreement.

The power project can be considered a template development in a “very compact site” which engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contractor-lead Daelim Industrial Co. Ltd. had valuably accomplished.

And since the San Buenaventura power facility was built next to an operating plant (the 460MW Quezon power facility), the EPC contractor had likewise been given a very strict instruction “not to disturb” or shall not in any way affect the operations of its neighbor-generating asset.

“The challenge for the construction team is how to position cranes and how to lift so you won’t interfere with the other plant, so it has been a very, very interesting construction challenge. But I had to say that the EPC guys had really done a great job,” Thiel has narrated.

For Meralco, the commercial operations of the SBPL plant will mark the utility firm’s re-entry into the baseload power generation play, which essentially will help address the long-term electricity needs of its captive customers – or those segments of consumers that cannot exercise yet their “power of choice” in the retail competition arena of the deregulated power industry.