It’s a go for P3-B biomass-fired plant in Negros

BACOLOD CITY—Investors have poured in P3 billion for the construction of an

18-megawatt biomass-fired power plant in San Carlos City in Negros Occidental.

San Carlos BioPower (SCBP) has received the funds in accordance with agreements reached in November last year that enabled it to complete equity, said Jose Maria Zabaleta Sr., chair of the company and Bronzeoak Philippines.

“We have reached financial closure and so the [biomass power] project is a go,” Zabaleta told the Inquirer on Thursday.

The clearing of the project site at  San Carlos Ecozone will begin immediately while construction will follow in May. The plant is expected to be completed by the end of 2014.

Wuxi Huaguang Electric Power Engineering, the general supplier and contractor of the project, will also be its designer and builder of the plant, Zabaleta said.

The facility will rise beside the integrated sugar mill and ethanol distillery of San Carlos BioEnergy, which is owned by Menarco Clean Energy and Bronzeoak Philippines.

It would provide some 1,000 jobs during construction and eventually employ almost 400 people when it  starts operating in early 2015, Zabaleta said. Generated power will be supplied to the grid.

“We plan to add two more power plants in Negros,” he said. These projects would help all farmers, both large and small, to increase their income since the agricultural residue, formerly waste just burned, would be turned into a more valuable resource, he added.

SCBP has been issued its certificate of registration by the Board of Investments on Dec. 21, 2012.

On Feb. 13, the Department of Energy found the company to have met the minimum documentary requirements to avail itself of the feed-in-tariff (FIT) rates when it begins commercial operations as part of the first 250 MW of installed biomass power capacity.

The FIT rate is a premium rate paid for electricity fed back into the electricity grid from a renewable electricity generation source. It applies to renewable energy power generation projects at P5.90 per kilowatt-hour (kWh) for run-of-river hydropower, P6.63 per kWh for biomass, P8.53 per kWh for wind, and P9.68 per kWh for solar.

Energy Director Mario Marasigan expressed support for one of the first biomass power plants to be built under the Renewable Energy Law.