Chile's Consorcio Santa Marta Continues Construction of Central ERNC Power Plant

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Cordoba, Argentina)--Chilean company Consorcio Santa Marta S.A. (Santiago de Chile-Chile) is continuing with the construction of the 16-megawatt (MW) ERNC Santa Marta power plant. The ERNC project is classified as an unconventional renewable energy source, as the main fuel of the power plant will be the biogas produced at the Santa Marta landfill.

The ERNC Santa Marta power plant will be located on the Santa Marta Landfill campus at the Talangante commune, in the Santiago metropolitan region of central Chile. With an investment of approximately $36 million, the power plant will have a capacity of 16 MW that will be delivered to the national grid.

The ERNC power plant will be equipped with eight G3500 Warstila (Helsinki, Finlandia) internal combustion engines, each with a generating capacity of 2 MW. Seven of these units will be baseload, and one will work as a peakload unit.

Construction started during the second quarter of 2012. According to the company's schedule, the units will start the commissioning phase in July 2013, and the power plant will enter operations in August of the same year.

The company Consorcio Santa Marta plans to expand the generating capacity of the power plant to 35 MW in two more phases. The first one will have 4-MW and an investment of approximately $5.5 million. The second phase will have 15 MW, and the approximate investment will be $22.5 million. According to the schedule, the bidding process for the second phase will be launched during 2014, and the kick-off is expected to begin in the first quarter of 2015. The power plant expansion is expected to be completed during the third quarter of 2018.

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