Steag coal power plant in Misamis Oriental back to normal operations

CAGAYAN DE ORO CITY – Independent power producer Steag State Power Inc. (SPI) has announced it has gone back to its normal operations after shutting down one of its generating units for a preventive maintenance last Saturday and Sunday.

In an emailed statement Monday, SPI spokesperson Jerome Soldevilla said the coal-fired power plant “is currently in full capacity operations following the synchronization back to the Mindanao grid of its Unit 1 over the weekend.”

Since it started operating in 2006, the power plant in Villanueva, Misamis Oriental, has delivered more than 12 billion kilowatts of power to the Mindanao grid and has sustained a high availability rating of 90 percent with low unplanned outage rate of 2.5 percent.

Its two generating units are capable of producing a total of 210 megawatts that it feeds to the island’s grid.

During the temporary shutdown, Mindanao lost 105 megawatts of power for two days.

Earlier, SPI president and Dr. Bodo Goerlich, the CEO, explained that it has been the company’s strategy to conduct initial preventive maintenance activities during the first quarter of this year to ensure the power plant’s optimal availability during the summer season.

Meanwhile, the Mindanao grid has a reserve power of 62 megawatts, according to the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines’ outlook as of 1 p.m. Monday.

The NGCP said the island had a system capacity of 1,471 megawatts, with a system peak at 1,409 megawatts, much less than the rest of the country.

Luzon has a system capacity of 9,718 megawatts and a system peak of 8,358, with a reserve of 1,360; Visayas has 1,801 megawatts of system capacity, 1,607 of system peak, and reserve of 194, it added.  SFM