POWER firms continue to harness the power of Badian town’s river.
Cebu Electric Cooperative (Cebeco) 1 is set to start another P70 million hydropower plant in barangay Basak, its second mini-hydro-power plant in the village.
This will add 500 kilowatts (KW) of power to the existing 500 KW mini-hydro power plant.
¨Badian (about 80 kilometers from Cebu city) is the only province in Cebu which has two mini-hydro plants in one barangay,¨ said Michael Cañete, president and chief operations officer of Meadowlands Inc., one of the firms in the project.
The project had its groundbreaking yesterday. Cebeco will operate the mini-hydropower plant which is scheduled to operate in 2014.
Meadowland officials said that they used the run-of-river type scheme which exploits the normal base flow of the river for power generation as opposed to the storage type used by bigger dams to store large volumes of water for power generation.
Cost effective
Mario Marasigan, geologist and director of renewable energy management bureau of the Dept. of Energy, said hydropwer is the most cost-effective and reliable energy technology for providing clean electricity.
Marasigan said the mini hydropower plant would provide 300 jobs as well as have a peso for every kilowatt hour to be sold which would be used for electrification.
Cebu province has three hydro-power plants: Mantayupan in Barili, Matutinao and Basak 1 both in Badian mini hydropower plants with an aggregate capacity of 1.72 megawatts./Correspondent Tweeny M. Malinao