Cleaner coal plans answer to looming power crisis – Meralco

DESPITE opposition from various groups and local communities, the development of cleaner coal power plants may be the answer to a looming power crisis in the next four years.

John Quirke, Meralco Power Generation Corp. senior vice president for technical development, said during an exclusive roundtable with The Manila Times on Friday that the country has one of the highest electricity rates in the world because of the lack of “modern and efficient” power plants. This problem could also lead to a power shortage in 2015 to 2016.

“Until there is a fresh gas find or stark change in how hydrocarbon is imported in the Philippines, you’re left with stark choice to build a clean coal power plant to meet base load generation needs of Luzon and the Philippines,” Quirke added.

A power crisis may send electricity rates higher and result in brownouts similar to what the country experienced in the 1990s, said Angelo Lantin, Meralco PowerGen senior vice president and head of commercial development.

Meralco PowerGen, a wholly-owned unit of Manila Electric Co., is one of the shareholders in Redondo Peninsula Energy Inc. (RP Energy), which is building the country’s largest circulating fluidized bed coal plant with a capacity of 600 megawatts in Subic.

The total cost of the project, which will come on stream in 2015, will reach $ 1.28 billion.

While one of the targets of building the power plant is to bring down electricity prices, Meralco PowerGen officials said that would depend on various components such as engineering, procurement and construction costs and coal prices.

“We want to build a plant that will provide some protection against these increases in coal prices, make it as efficient as we can,” Quirke said.

“What we do promise to do though is there’ll be no mark-up for us on the price of coal. We will pass that to the consumers without marking it up to the point that we’re not the beneficiary of it at all,” he added.

Lantin said that the company is working hard to dispel the notion that coal plants are major pollutants, having conducted 10 dialogues in the last two months with communities in Zambales, Subic and Olongapo to address their concerns.

Drastic change

“Over these past several years, there’s been a drastic change in technology. The circulating fluidized bed coal technology is internationally recognized as one, if not the cleanest, coal technology,” he added.

The plant’s projected emission of nitrogen oxide, sulfur oxide and dust particles as well as effluents is significantly way better than the country’s current environmental standards, considered at par with world standards.

According to the World Resource Institute 2011, the Philippines only contributes 0.48 percent to greenhouse gases emission worldwide and has a lower footprint from electricity generation and overall than the rest of Asia.

Citing a study by the Department of Energy and Natural Resources-Environmental Management Bureau in 2008, Quirke said that coal combustion in large power plants only account for about half a percent of the mercury air emissions in the Philippines.

According to the study, mining and geothermal power production are the two biggest contributors, accounting for 48.9 percent and 38.9 percent, respectively.

“People appreciate the fact that we are not mandated to do this and yet we do this [dialogue]. For common people, they raise their questions and upon getting information, some appreciate that they are now more informed,” said David Evangelista, Meralco PowerGen development analyst.

During a three-year construction period, the project will hire approximately 2,000 people and Quirke said that the company will give priority to the employment of local residents.

The facility will also employ 180 people once it becomes operational.

On top of the direct employment that can be generated from the project, the company has also committed to allocate certain budgets for the community and has also started the implementation of livelihood projects.

“Visually, it will not look that bad. Nowadays, you won’t see black smoke because of the advances in the technology,” Lantin said.

In a special report about what has been dubbed by locals in the Subic Bay Area as the “Meralco-Aboitiz Coal-Fired Power Plant,”

The Times detailed the opposition to the plant’s being located in the Subic special zone governed by the Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority.

Health data

The groups opposing the coal-fired plant include the Olongapo-Zambales Civil Society Network consisting of 21 sectoral organizations, all the tourist-industry businesses located in Subic, the Philippine branch of Greenpeace, the city council and the mayor of Olongapo City and the provincial council and the governor of Zambales.

Their opposition is based on the scientific findings about the damage to human and animal health that even the most latest coal-fired power plants in the United State cause and the destructive effect on Subic tourism.

Subic, apart from being a special economic zone for business and industry, is a designated Philippine tourism centerpiece.

The RP Energy executives at the roundtable, however, told The Times that the project opponents’ health data are wrong and based not on the state-of-the-art coal plant being proposed.

They said that no leaching of toxic materials will ever happen because the ash would be sold to cement companies and the unsold ash will be entombed.

The system being built has a mechanism to trap up to 98 percent of any mercury and health-damaging particulates so that there will almost be no emission at all.

Critics of the project also claimed that the Environmental Clearance Certificate granted to the project during the Arroyo administration was issued unlawfully because officials of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources ignored required procedures, including consultations with all stakeholders.

They also pointed out that the project has become a “development and lease agreement” disadvantageous to the government because the rent RP Energy will pay to SBMA is the equivalent of P3.50 per square meter when the going rate in Subic is up to P35,000 per square meter.

SBMA will end up getting a measly P1 million per year from the project, while other coal-fired power plants pay up to P500 million annually to the government.

The critics also asked why the proposed coal plant became a 600-megawatt project when it was originally just a 300MW installation. –Krista Angela M. Montealegre, Reporter, Manila Times