KIDAPAWAN CITY (MindaNews / 10 Nov) – After a month of preventive maintenance, the coal-fired power plants owned by the STEAG State Power, Inc. (SPI) are now fully operational, improving Mindanao’s power situation that has been racked by rotating brownouts.
In a statement, Jerome Soldevilla, head of the communications department of STEAG, said the two coal plants situated in Villanueva, Misamis Oriental each with a capacity of 105 megawatts are now back online.
The first unit shut its power from October 6 until November 4 this year, while the second from October 29 until Nov 10.
Soldevilla said that STEAG’s Unit 2 located in Villanueva town was officially synchronized to the Mindanao grid at 8:58 a.m. today.
Around 10 a.m. today, STEAG officially declared that 200MW of power from its coal plants became available to the grid.
“The precarious power supply condition in Mindanao is expected to substantially improve with the full capacity operation of STEAG’s power plants beginning today,” said Soldevilla.
He stressed that the preventive maintenance, as planned and scheduled, will bring long-term benefits for Mindanao power consumers in terms of operational reliability.
Data from STEAG showed that their power plants sustained an availability rate of 93.3 percent and a low unplanned outage rate of less than one percent.
Since November 2006, the plants had delivered more than 8.3 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity to Mindanao, which represented about 20 percent of the island’s generation mix, STEAG records show. (Malu Cadeliña Manar / MindaNews)