The 414-megawatt San Gabriel gas-fired power plant of First Gen Corporation has been on forced outage due to ‘tripping’ or technical glitch, hence, its capacity is not being made available to the grid.
“Unit 70 of the company’s 414MW San Gabriel combined cycle power plant tripped on September 5, 2020 due to activation of generator protection,” First Gen has stated in its disclosure to the Philippine Stock Exchange.
It added that Siemens Power Operations is already undertaking “preliminary electrical tests on the generator within the following days to determine the nature of the problem and the cause of the trip.”
By far, according to First Gen, initial findings indicate “an electrical fault in the generator,” and that mainly triggered the tripping of the facility.
“Further investigation and inspection of the generator is ongoing,” the Lopez firm said, as it also emphasized that the plant has been “declared unavailable for dispatch during this time.”
First Gen added “pending completion of the experts’ findings, the company is unable to provide an estimate of the expected return to service of the San Gabriel plant.”
The capacity of the San Gabriel power facility has been committed for an off-take arrangement with the Manila Electric Company (Meralco). But First Gen said this downtime of the plant is still within the allowable outage allowance, hence, there is no need for the company yet to source for replacement power.
The San Gabriel plant is one of the new gas assets of First Gen that came on-line in 2016; and its existing power supply agreement (PSA) with Meralco is until 2024.
When the plant first reached commercial operations in 2016, it has been operating as a merchant facility, mostly selling its generated electricity via the Wholesale Electricity Spot Market.
It was in March 2018 when San Gabriel plant’s corporate vehicle First NatGas Power Corporation (FNPC) sealed its PSA with the country’s biggest power distribution firm – and that will last for six years or until February 2024.
As stipulated in the PSA filing of the two firms with the Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC), “the simulated delivered price of P3.8637 per kilowatt hour provides for a lower cost of power compared to the simulated effective cost at WESM of P4.4405 per kWh.”
Aside from San Gabriel, the other gas-fired plants of First Gen are the 1,000MW Santa Rita, 500MW San Lorenzo and 97MW Avion plants.
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