Maibarara capacity buildup on track to December schedule

Maibarara Geothermal Inc. (MGI) said the addition of 12 megawatts of generating capacity to its 20-MW facility in Batangas was on track to the planned start of commercial operation in December 2017.

A unit of PetroEnergy Resources Corp., MGI’s Maibarara-1 generator was cited as the Best Renewable Energy Project in the national grid category of the Asean Energy Awards 2017 held at Pasay City in September.

Paul Morala, MGI power plant manager, said in a statement that with help from National Grid Corp. of the Philippines, MGI had installed the revenue meter of Maibarara-2 on Sept. 30.

“MGI and Meralco (Manila Electric Co.) engineers jointly and successfully completed on Oct. 24 the testing of Maibarara-2’s protection relays and circuit breakers,” Morala said.

“And on Oct. 29, the unit’s Scada (supervisory control and data acquisition) system and direct transfer trip (DTT) function passed MGI and Meralco testing,” he added.

According to MGI, Maibarara’s first unit reached its 600-gigawatt-hour generation mark during the billing period ending last Oct. 25, barely four years since the plant started commercial operation in February 2014.

The company said that back then, Maibarara-1 was the first geothermal power station built in Luzon in 16 years. It was also the first renewable energy project declared commercial by the Department of Energy under the framework of the 2008 Renewable Energy Law.

“Apart from the scheduled annual maintenance shutdowns, we have managed to minimize forced outages in the facility leading to very high capacity and availability factors,” MGI president Francisco G. Delfin Jr. said. —RONNEL W. DOMINGO