Owned by independent power producer KEILCO, the 1,200 megawatt Ilijan combined-cycle power plant in Batangas City, Philippines went into operation in 2002 and was quickly named one of the world’s top 12 power plants by a leading US power industry magazine in 2003.

Ilijan combined cycle power plant is the largest power generation facility in the Philippines and part of the country's gas-to-power project, which uses natural gas from the offshore Malampaya field to generate electricity at Ilijan and two other combined cycle power plants.

Ilijan has the distinction of housing the Philippines' biggest reverse osmosis desalination plant and first 500 kV switchyard (the desalination plant provides water for the power plant, and the power generated is transferred to the 500 kV transmission grid). The entire infrastructure of the gas-to-power project – offshore platform, pipelines, power plants, desalination plant, high-voltage transmission – was built from scratch.

ABB was recently selected by KEILCO to upgrade the distributed control system (DCS) at what is generally considered the node of the gas-to-power project - the 2x600 MW Ilijan power plant.

ABB supplied the original DCS solution in the early 2000s, and is enhancing the system to provide the plant with cutting-edge capability while simultaneously protecting the customer’s original investment.

Among its many new features the enhancement will upgrade the operator stations and servers and significantly increase the speed of the network, as well as provide loop segmentation to enable partial shutdown of the plant in planned or emergency situations.

System evolution is fundamental to ABB’s control system philosophy. It enables customers to evolve their control systems as needs grow or change, while protecting major system investments like process graphics, control applications and history data.

ABB is implementing the installation online to minimize the plant shutdown to just final testing and a short planned outage, thereby enabling the plant to maintain its target availability of 90 percent.

Source: ABB