By HERBERT VEGO
CONGRESSMAN Arcadio Gorriceta (2nd District, Iloilo) waxed ecstatic the other day while briefing us about Palm Concepcion Power Corporation, which has begun constructing a 135-megawatt coal-fired power plant at barangay Nipa, Concepcion, Iloilo. Gorriceta was one of the government officials who graced its ground-breaking last Thursday.
“It will surely ensure power self-sufficiency in the region,” Gorriceta enthused.
He said that Aklan’s Gov. Joeben Miraflores had flown to the site by helicopter, indicating his province’s intention to patronize Palm. Power shortage has always been a perennial problem of Aklan.
Palm Concepcion is by necessity the third coal-fired power plant to rise in Iloilo.
However, Gorriceta expressed surprise why the general managers of the three electric cooperatives in Iloilo had not come.
And so yesterday morning I called up Engr. Wilfred Billena, general manager of Iloilo-1 Electric Cooperative (ILECO-1).
“I was not personally there due to a previous commitment,” Billena explained why he had not attended the ground-breaking. “But our cooperative was represented by somebody else.”
ILECO-1, he said, also intends to buy power from Palm Concepcion as soon as possible.
“But our decision would depend on competitive selection process,” he said. “We have made known our intention to buy power there at P5.11 per kilowatt hour.”
ILECOs 1, 2 and 3 currently buy power from the National Power Corporation, Panay Power Corporation (PPC) and the coal-fired Panay Energy Development Corporation (PEDC) at more or less seven pesos per kilowatt hour.
PEDC, incidentally, has already put up two coal-fired plants with capacity of 164 and 150 megawatts, respectively. A third “reinforcement” is on the drawing board.
It is to PEDC’s credit that objectors to coal as energy source have rested their “pollution” case. The company has proven coal critics wrong; they would now sound like the boy who cried wolf.
The world trend now is to phase out diesel-fed power plants and replace them with coal-fired ones.
The existing coal-fired powerhouses in the Philippines thrive on the so-called “clean-coal” technology that has minimized our dependence on expensive oil.
Incidentally, the abusive oil cartel has lost the patronage of more than 50 per cent of power plants in the United States and China, which are already coal-fired. If these power plants would revert to diesel, then the price of oil would probably rise twice its present cost.
Coal-fired units produce electricity by burning coal in a boiler to heat water to produce steam. The steam, at tremendous pressure, flows into a turbine, which spins a generator to produce electricity. The steam is cooled, condensed back into water, and returned to the boiler to start the process over.
It was in Washington DC way back in 1979 when a few scientists and engineers completed the world’s first “fluidized bed boiler” on the campus of Georgetown University. It was a small coal burner by today’s standards, but large enough to provide heat and steam for much of the university campus while filtering out pollutants.
Modern coal-fired power plants have special devices that clean the sulfur from the coal’s combustion gases before the gases go up the smokestack. The technical name for these devices is “flue gas desulfurization units,” but most people just call them “scrubbers” because they “scrub” the sulfur out of the smoke released by coal-burning boilers. Most scrubbers rely on crushed limestone to absorb sulfur gases much like a sponge absorbs water.
The tumbling action allows limestone to be mixed in with the coal. A chemical reaction occurs, and the sulfur gases are changed into a dry powder that can be removed from the boiler. Incidentally, this dry powder – called calcium sulfate – is now popular material for cheap wallboard./PN
