Thursday, September 04, 2008 So: Moms would love this coal-fired power plant By Michelle P. So Caught in the Net
TECHNOLOGY has advanced so much that it has even made dust particles, which only our mothers notice even in the dead of the night but more so during the day, visible on the DENR computer screens at a mouse click.
I point this out because a new power plant in Villanueva, two towns away from Cagayan de Oro, is using a clean coal technology that neutralizes air pollutants emitted from the plant.
The same technology is being used at the Apec power plant in Mabalacat, Pampanga and will be adopted by the one being built in Sangi, Toledo City in Cebu.
While these new plants generate hundreds of megawatts of power, they are conscious of their corporate social responsibility not to pollute the air in the community where they are.
The coal plants in Mabalacat and Villanueva are modern, clean and digitized. They are run by young engineers whose idea of manual labor is walking from one facility to another that are spaced apart in hundreds of meters.
Here in Villanueva, inside the Phividec Industrial Estate of Misamis Oriental, lies the Mindanao Power Plant of Steag State Power Inc. (SPI). SPI is composed of Evonik Steag GmbH, Aboitiz Power Corp. and State Investment Trust Inc. It has a 25-year power purchase agreement with the National Power Corp.
The Mindanao Power Plant began its commercial operation in November 2006 with a rated capacity of 232 MW and a net dependable capacity of 210 MW.
According to an SPI statement, the power plant has increased Mindanao’s systems reserve margin from “a critical level of 13 percent” before it operated to “a more comfortable level of 24 percent” after it started running fully. The required systems reserve margin for Mindanao is at least 21 percent.
We don’t have to understand the lingo of the power people, but in layman’s terms, it means that we will now have a more dependable power supply and we can watch, uninterrupted, all the shows of GMA 7 and ABS-CBN, unless of course we’ve been disconnected for failing to pay the electric bills because we’ve been watching too much TV.
Now, the TV set is the only home appliance that gets stared at for hours but no one except our mothers sees the dust that has gathered on it like a sandbar. In fairness to the mothers, they’re not blaming the power plant for causing the selective blindness of the other members of the family.
Jerome Soldevilla, SPI communications manager, says the Mindanao Power Plant uses “a state-of-the-art anti-pollution system” that, from the way he explains it, mothers would nag everyone in the house to death to buy or install. (“Moooom, it’s for a power plant!”) Soldevilla says the plant registers a pollution level below the limit set by international standards.
There’s something unique in this SPI power plant that is fueled by bituminous coal. Emissions from the plant are monitored online by the Misamis Oriental office of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR).
The monitoring system of the SPI power plant is linked to the DENR computers, allowing the government department to know how much impurities the plant is emitting in the MisOr air. This saves the DENR people from leaving their offices to check the grittiness of the air with their fingers.
