FULL repairs to a key power plant supplying electricity to the province of Iloilo will take up to next year, a subsidiary of listed real estate developer A Brown Co. said.

A two-phase repair of Palm Concepcion Power Corp.'s (PCPC) 135-megawatt (MW) power plant in Concepcion, Iloilo, whose unscheduled outages have been tagged as responsible for blackouts in Panay earlier this year, began earlier this month.

PCPC on Sunday said that the repair, which started on June 4, was being done through United Kingdom-based Quartzelec Ltd.

The reinsulation of damaged coils at the plant will lead to full operations by August 3, it added, but a second phase will still need to be conducted, along with annual preventive maintenance, up to November 2025.

The delay is due to the need to manufacture replacement parts aboard, PCPC explained.

The blackouts in Panay led to a Senate investigation where PCPC officials said that they were unable to perform periodic maintenance on the plant due to the lack of spare parts.

National Grid Corp. of the Philippines said that unscheduled outages of other power plants on the island, along with scheduled maintenance work on others, were behind the loss of electricity across Panay.

PCPC's 135-MW power plant started commercial operation in August 2016 and was built at an investment cost of $280 million. It is one of the four major power plants on Panay Island.

According to its website, nine distribution utilities and electric cooperatives rely on PCPC for their base load power capacity requirements.

A Brown, which is primarily engaged in the business of real estate development in Northern Mindanao, has in recent years diversified into power generation, public utilities, and agribusiness in the form of palm oil.

The firm's shares closed unchanged at 58 centavos apiece on Friday.

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