PSALM announced winners of Sual and Pagbilao coal-powered plants IPPAs
Posted on August 28th, 2009
The Power Sector Assets and Liabilities Management Corp. (PSALM) announced the winning bidders for the 1,000-megwat (MW) Sual coal fired power plant and the 700-MW Pagbilao coal facility in Quezon.
The bidding for Sual was won by food and beverage giant San Miguel Corp., through its San Miguel Energy Corp. (SMEC), with its offer of $1.07 billion, while the Pagbilao was won by another power firm, the Aboitiz’s Therma Luzon Inc. with a bid of $691 million.
PSALM said the two highest bids met the government’s price for the management of Sual and Pagbilao’s independent power producer administrator (IPPA) contracts for the two coal-fired plants.
The two companies’s both participated in the first bidding for the Sual and Pagbilao’s IPPAs last June, but PSALM said, “While the technical bids of the two companies met the government’s requirements for both capacities, their financial offers came up short of the floor price.â€
With slight modification and improvements in their earlier offers, Therma and SMEC managed to bag the contract.
PSALM is now in the process of verifying the accuracy, authenticity and completeness of the bid documents that they have submitted before it would issue a Notice of Award of award to Therma and SMEC. They would then be formally declared as the winning IPP administrators for the contracted capacities of the Sual and Pagbilao power facilities.
The two facilities were the first batch of IPPA contracts that were bid out to the private sector for management.
The government’s National Power Corp. currently has the contract of IPPs to supply electricity. Under the Electric Power Industry Reform Act of 2001, privatization of the government’s IPP contracts is one of the five requirements before open access and retail competition can be implemented.
PSALM is finished with Phase I with the successful appointment of the Sual and Pagbilao’s IPPAs. It is now about to enter Phase II of its IPPA selection process, which will involve the bidding out of the contracts for the 140-MW Casecnan, 70-MW Bakun and 95-MW San Roque hydropower plants.
After the hydropower plants, Phase III would then come in which will involve the sale of the 1,200-MW contracted capacity in the Ilijan natural gas plant.
