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TALISAY CITY – The First Farmers Holding Corp. is selling carbon credits from the operations of its 21-megawatt bagasse cogeneration plant to Spanish power company Endesa under the Clean Development Mechanism.
Executives of Endesa led by deputy director for operations, Maria Antonia Abad Puertolas and head of origination, Pablo Fernandez Guillen, and Endesa Carbon S.L. country manager Anita Celdran visited the plant in Brgy. Dos Hermanas here yesterday.
FFHC president Jose Ma. Villanueva said he is optimistic about the CDM project as they now have a buyer of emission reduction credits that would mean more operational benefits for the sugar mill.
Villanueva and general manager Leo Echaus toured the Endesa team at the power plant which is now on a commissioning stage, gradually supplying power to the National Grid Corp. of the Philippines (formerly the National Transmission Corp.) for about three weeks now.
The cogeneration plant has an export potential of 15MW.
Echaus said that once the mill management declares it is commercially-operating and selling power, the monitoring of the carbon credits will start. A third party auditor will validate the results.
FFHC, whose CDM project was registered with United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in September last year, is estimated to provide emission reductions of 118,528 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year, figures of Endesa Carbono, a leader in the carbon trading and advisory business in the Philippines which developed the FFHC portfolio, show.
The CDM allows emission-reduction or emission removal projects in developing countries to earn certified emission reduction credits, each equivalent to one ton of CO2.
These CERs can be traded and sold, and used by industrialized countries to a meet a part of their emission reduction targets under the Kyoto Protocol that sets binding targets for 37 industrialized countries and the European community for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Each carbon credit or a unit equal to a one ton carbon dioxide equivalent can be sold at about $10 to buyer-countries like the United Kingdom, Northern Ireland, Switzerland, Netherlands and Japan.
POWER PLANT
Endesa Carbono said that under CDM project, FFHC is replacing all its boilers and turbine generators with a cogeneration station fueled by bagasse, renewable energy waste product from sugarcane. The power plant is using bagasse generated by the mill and supplemented by those purchased from other sugar mills and plantations.
FFHC would be the first sugar mill in Negros to connect to the transmission grid as it becomes a commercial power supplier.
Echaus said that of its 21-MW plant capacity, the sugar mill uses only 3.5 to 5MW for its operations, and even lower at merely 2MW during the off-milling season.
“We are continually synchronizing our operations with the grid for it to be compatible with the systems operator and the end-users. All the equipment are in place,” he said.*
