ILOILO CITY – Oscar Lopez, chairman of the First Gen Corp., the power generation arm of the Lopez Group, said yesterday the First Gen-led consortium will bid for the Palinpinon-Dingle generation package after they were awarded the 60 percent stake in the PNOC-Energy Development Corp. last week.

“As you know, we just won the bidding for PNOC-EDC. They intend to bid for Palinpinon,” Lopez said at the sidelines of the 1st Iloilo Investment Forum here.

The generation package consists of the 192.5-MW Palinpinon Geothermal Power Plant in Valencia , Negros Oriental and the 146.5-MW Panay Diesel Power Plant located in Dingle, Iloilo .

“Right now most of power of Palinpinon goes to Bacolod and Cebu . It's just the residual that comes to Panay . We would like to maybe reverse that, bring more power to Panay . We'll (have) the cheapest power in the region,” he said.

Lopez said that if the group bids successfully for the Palinpinon-Dingle package, they would want to bring more geothermal power to Panay .

“But this has a lot of ifs. I suppose there are contracts (of PNOC-EDC) we cannot just break it. The intention is to provide Panay with cheap power from geothermal source,” he said.

First Gen-led consortium Red Vulcan Holdings Corp. now controls the PNOC-Energy Development Corp., the geothermal power generation unit of Philippine National Oil Company, after the government sold its 60 percent share to the group last week.

The consortium, which includes the Netherlands-based Spalmare Holdings B.V. and Prime Terracota Holdings Corp., offered P58.5 billion for PNOC-EDC's six billion common shares, or 26.67 percent, and 7.5 billion preferred shares, or 33.33 percent.*NLG

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