Power plant to operate ahead of schedule

The National Power Corp. (Napocor) is optimistic that the 345-megawatt San Roque hydro power plant will start operating three years ahead of schedule.

Napocor OIC-president and chief executive officer Roland S. Quilala told The STAR that the biggest hydro power in Asia located in San Manuel, Pangasinan will be commissioned in December this year.

"We have visited the site recently and we are hopeful that we could start commissioning on December this year or January 2003," Quilala said.

The project, which is originally scheduled for completion and commission on January 2005, is under a build-operate-transfer (BOT) scheme with Marubeni Corp. of Japan as contractor.

According to the Napocor official, they have threshed out all the right-of-way problems of the project. "Most of the issues that we have confronted were on the upstream (right-of-way) but in the downstream (the development of the project itself) we have no problem," he said.

The multi-purpose project will provide various services to the area such as: irrigation, electrification, potable water supply and flood control.

The San Roque project is one of the seven power generation projects started by Napocor last year up to 2006 as part of the company’s effort to enhance its system capacity.

Six of the seven generation projects of Napocor are all located in Luzon. Two of the projects started operations last year. These are Bakun A/C, a hydroelectric power plant with 70 megawatts (MW) capacity located in Ilocos and Casecnan hydro plant with 140 MW in Pangasinan.

Aside from San Roque, Bakun and Casecnan, the other projects are: Ilijan 1,200 MW natural gas project (originally scheduled for commissioning January 2002 but moved to June this year), Kalayaan 3 & 4 pump 350 MW hydro plant (January 2003), and San Pascual 300 MW cogeneration project which was recently cancelled by the proponents.

The only project not located in Luzon under the proposed Napocor generation projects is the 200 MW Mindanao Coal 1 plant in Cagayan De Oro which is expected to commence in January 2006.

Napocor’s committed projects in Luzon are intended for the development and utilization of indigenous energy resources; namely, natural gas for baseload generation and hydro for peaking operations.