$900m gas power plant wows investors
Gas-fired power continues to expand as the technology for getting energy from natural gas keeps improving and growing “cleaner.”
One of the latest projects to enter the pipeline in the US is Competitive Power Ventures’ (CPV) Sentinel power plant, a $900 million project whose backers have just closed the financing on. In addition to CPV, co-owners behind the facility include GE Energy Financial Services and Diamond Generating Corporation.
The Sentinel development, to be built in Riverside County, California, is the largest project financing completed yet this year in the US thermal power industry.
A total of 23 banks — working with lead arrangers MUFG, Royal Bank of Scotland, ING, Natixis and Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp.– agreed to provide credit facilities of nearly $800 million for construction and other capital needs. With almost $2 billion of commitments received from lenders, interest in the project was so high that the syndicated loan was 2.4 times oversubscribed, according to the developers.
With all permits finalized and the debt financing in place, Gemma Power Systems California is scheduled to start construction of the 800-megawatt (MW) project immediately, with CPV Sentinel scheduled to go into commercial operation in the summer of 2013.
The new power plant will help prevent blackouts during extremely hot weather by providing peak power on demand. Given CPV Sentinel’s close proximity to 600 MW of wind farms, the project also will support California in meeting its goal of generating 33 percent of its power from renewable sources by 2020 by facilitating the integration of wind and solar power into the electric grid. When the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine, CPV Sentinel can backstop the lost generation.
The plant will feature GE’s ecomagination-certified aeroderivative LMS100 gas turbine-generators, which are designed to operate at 43 percent simple-cycle efficiency. That’s nearly 10 percent better than the next most efficient simple-cycle plant in California today.
