MANILA, Philippines – Bronzeoak Philippines Inc. is pushing back the completion of the first of its three biomass power plants in Negros Island in the second quarter next year as it reconfigured boilers and retested the feedstock in the area.
The company is working on three biomass power projects in Negros located in San Carlos, Manapla and La Carlota totaling 70 megawatts (MW) in capacity, with the International Finance Corp. (IFC) providing $161 million in funding, Bronzeoak director Don Mario Dia said.
“We are finishing our first of its kind biomass plant hopefully by second quarter next year. First quarter was our original target,” he said, referring to the San Carlos project.
The delay was due to the reconfiguration of the plants’ boilers since the company increased the capacity of the plants, Dia said.
“We had to reconfigure the boilers. Originally, it was at 18 MW then we expanded it to 19.99 MW, close to 20 MW. So when we did that, we resized the boiler,” he said.
Since the boilers were resized, the company had to retest the available feedstock in the area, Dia said.
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“The other [reason for the delay] is we retested the fuel source. Will we do pure sugar cane trash or we will mix it with others so we will have a back up of fuel source, like wood chips, coconut husks, rice husks or napier grass. So we went back to redesigning of the boiler with the supplier,” the company official said.
Bronzeoak tapped Chinese supplier Wuxi Huaguang Electric Power Engineering for the boilers.
Once the San Carlos plant is finished, Dia said the two biomass plants will follow every year after. “But if we have more equity, we can advance it,” he said.
Last August, IFC announced it would invest in the three biomass plants of Bronzeoak, together with the Government of Canada and Clean Technology Fund.
The three power plants are expected to qualify for the biomass feed-in-tariff (FIT) of the Energy Regulatory Commission, which has an installation target of 250 MW.
