First Gen energizing seven new power plants by end of 2024

Lopez-led renewable energy firm First Gen Corporation on Friday announced it is bringing to commercial operations seven new power generation facilities by the end of the year.

In his message at the company’s annual stockholders meeting in Makati City, First Gen president and chief operating officer Francis Giles Puno said First Gen’s subsidiary, Energy Development Corporation (EDC), is investing about P30 billion “to build 83 megawatts (MW) of new geothermal power plants and 4 megawatt-hours (MWh) of battery energy storage system to be commissioned this year.”

Puno said of the seven power facilities, four are geothermal power plants with a combined capacity, while the remaining three are battery energy storage system (BESS) projects.

The new geothermal projects will require P24 billion in investments, while the BESS projects will cost about P5.3 billion for a total of P29.3 billion in investments.

The four geothermal projects are the P6.7-billion Palayan geothermal plant located inside EDC’s Bacon-Manito (BacMan) geothermal facility in Bicol; the P2.9-billion, 5.6-MW geothermal power plant in Bago City, Negros Occidental; the P6.6-billion, 20-MW Tanawon power plant located in BacMan; and the P7.8-billion, 28-MW Mahanagdong plant in EDC’s existing Leyte facilities.

The three BESS projects, meanwhile, are targeted to go online by the end of 2024. 

These are the P2.2-billion, 20-MWh BacMan BESS in Bicol; the P1.5-billion, 10-MWh Tongonan BESS in Leyte; and the P1.6-billion, 10-MWh Negros BESS.  

“We hope that adding these modest capacities into the grid from clean energy sources will help ease our country’s need for more power supply without creating stress to the environment,” Puno said.

First Gen currently has 1,622 MW of renewable energy generation capacity sourced from geothermal, hydro, solar and wind. 

First Gen also runs natural gas plants, bringing its total capacity to 3,639 MW.

Puno said the completion of the seven projects by the end of 2024 will bring the company’s total installed RE capacity to 1,705 MW. 

Together with its natural gas plants, total installed capacity would reach 3,722 MW by the end of the year.

By 2030, Puno said First Gen is aiming to have 13,000 MW or 13 gigawatts (GW) of total capacity or “an additional 9,500 MW in natural gas and RE.”

“Easily, that's at a million dollars per megawatt. That's easily $9 billion over that span of time. So it's a large investment that we will need,” he said.

“So the policies of the government have to be very supportive. Not only the policies, but the implementation of those policies has to be correct for it to attract the investors. The fact that we have a lot of investments that are needed,” he added. —VAL, GMA Integrated News