Meralco’s Mauban power plant starts to pitch in income

By Alena Mae S. Flores – March 02, 2020
from manilastandard.net

San Buenaventura Power Ltd. Co., the first majority-owned, commercially operating power plant of Manila Electric Co. since the company decided to return to the generation business, may contribute around P1 billion to P1.2 billion to the retailer’s bottom line this year.

Meralco PowerGen Corp. president Rogelio Singson said SBPL, which owns the 455-megawatt coal-fired power plant in Mauban, Quezon, contributed P300 million in 2019 year and could “possibly” pitch in around P1 billion to P1.2 billion this year.”

The SBPL power plant is a partnership between Meralco PowerGen, the power arm of Meralco, and New Growth BV, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Electricity Generating Co. of Thailand, the first independent power producer in Thailand. The plant started commercial operations in September.

“We have contributed to the bottom line of Meralco (this year) of about P300 million. We completed the project a little below budget and also on schedule so we are very happy of the outcome of the project and our partners Egco of Thailand are very happy with the performance so far of the project,” he said.

Meralco recorded a core net income of P23.832 billion in 2019, up 6 percent from P22.408 billion in 2018, driven by a 6-percent sales volume growth.

Meralco’s reported net income, adjusted to exclude the effect of foreign exchange gains or losses, impairment charges, mark-to-market adjustments and other one-time and exceptional transactions, increased slightly to P23.285 billion last year from P23.017 billion in 2018.

“We were able to deliver 852 gigawatt-hour to Meralco giving us a plant availability of about 87 percent. Now we continue to run today. As of today, we are running at full capacity of net 455 MW,” said Singson.

“We had some hiccups early January but we were able to address that immediately, in fact right now we have technicians who are experts in boiler. Because we had some problems in the specific location of the boiler that has been addressed and hopefully the solution is not anything major other than mere boiler tuning,” Singson added.