Monthly Archives: February 2008

Another Major Mindanao Outage

A huge swath of Mindanao was out of power, again, yesterday, disrupting activities for a lot of people and enterprises.
According to this report:
“a dropwire at the switchyard of Kibawe substation snapped at around 3:30 pm today and tripped bus breakers causing power loss to Southestern Mindanao and Davao City, and Southwestern Mindanao and General [...]

Broke-istan

Here’s a slide presentation from Lucas Rizoli’s presentation at the Un-Distinguished Lecture Series at the University of British Columbia given last week on “What Is The World Bank?”
Helpfully insightful in some ways I thought. The “dramatization” on Broke-istan starting at slide 54 seems oh so familiarly real … and slide 73 is just too funny. [...]

Data Point - Power Plant Sale

TransAlta sold two gas-fired generating plants (totaling 511 MW) in Mexico for $303.5 million.
That comes to $594/kW.
Interesting to contrast that with recent sale prices in the Philippines where coal and hydro plants are being sold in the $1100-$1800 range and averaging about $1500/kW.
But note that gas-fired plants are much cheaper to build much more expensive [...]