Marubeni completes San Roque transmission line

Japan's Marubeni Corp. has completed the construction of a 230-kilovolt (kV) transmission line that will link the San Roque multi-purpose power plant to the Luzon grid, a top National Transmission Corp. (Transco) official said on Friday. Transco president Alan T. Ortiz said Marubeni, majority owner of the San Roque facility, has financed the P220 million transmission line project. The project will be inaugurated next month. The new transmission line, Ortiz said, would enable San Roque to fully dispatch the power being generated from power facility. Ortiz said the new line would also replace the temporary line being used by power project. "This project will maximize the power that would be delivered from San Roque to other parts of Luzon. This may even help the power facility in using its whole capacity," he said. At present, San Roque is running only at 80 MW, much below its capacity of 345 MW because of the inability of the present temporary transmission line to transmit the power being generated from the facility. If the P220 million transmission line project will be completed and San Roque will be running at full capacity, Ortiz said the National Power Corp. (Napocor) could avail of much cheaper power from the power plant. San Roque Power Corp. (SRPC) has a multi-purpose project and its primary feature is a 200-meter-high, 1.2 kilometer-long embankment dam on the Agno River spanning the municipalities of San Manuel and San Nicolas, Pangasinan, nearly 200 km north of Metro Manila. One of the main objectives of SRPC's multipurpose project is the 345 MW Hydroelectric Power Plant, a peaking power plant which has the following features: rated at 345 MW (producing approximately 1,000 GWh/year) or renewable peaking energy to the Luzon Power Gird; and the ability to provide the Luzon Power Grid an additional dependable capacity of 85 MW, even during periods of extreme drought. The San Roque Dam is located on the lower Agno River of Pangasinan Province, in the Cordillera region of Luzon island in the Philippines. If completed, the 200 meter-high San Roque would be the largest private hydropower project in Asia. Electricity generated by the dam will be primarily used to power industrial activity and the burgeoning mining industry in northern Luzon. - GMANews.TV