TRANSCO BARGAIN SALE: With government scrounging around for funds, bargain-hunters can now buy National Transmission Co. (Transco), one of the companies spun off the giant National Power Corp., at just one-fourth of its original $2-billion asking price.

President Arroyo told us days ago that she had instructed Energy Secretary Vincent Perez Jr. to hurry up and sell Transco with that hefty 75 percent discount! But, she added the caveat, at that price no franchise comes with the transmission firm.

President sounded like she has grown tired waiting for Congress to grant the franchise (it is still stuck in the Slower House). Whoever buys Transco will have to lobby for the franchise.

Transco is the essential link between the power generating component of the national power system and the distribution firms, foremost of which is the Manila Electric Co. (Meralco). Both ends of the power system are useless without Transco in-between.

Btw, Malacanang and the rest of us keep calling it Transco. Everybody is hereby put on notice that Transco is already a registered trade name in the United Kingdom, the United States and possibly elsewhere.

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MONEY NO PROBLEM: The wonder of the recently inaugurated San Lorenzo power plant is that when the project proponents sought financing, they were granted much more money than they asked for.

First Gas Power Corp. of the Lopez Group needed about $1.5-billion to build San Lorenzo and its twin plant, Sta. Rosa. This was in the late 90s, at the height of the Asian financial crisis, when the economic condition of the region was most unfavorable.

The Lopezes thought that financial closure would be a tall order. But as things turned out, they were given access to credit lines way above what they asked for, and in record time at that.

The San Lorenzo project was five times oversubscribed and reached financial close in just five months. According to the lenders, that was one of the fastest ever in the world for a project of that magnitude and complexity.

In the case of Sta. Rita, banks from five continents offered funding in excess of $4 billion as against the $680-million financing package sought by the proponent.

No, money does not grow on trees, but there is a lot of money for good projects with credible proponents.

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GOLDEN AGE: The twin San Lorenzo and Sta. Rita projects — twins because they are in the same site, they have identical machines, and they’re operated by one group — are the centerpieces of what First Gas chairman Oscar Lopez describes as the “second epoch” of the Lopez Group’s involvement in the energy sector.

The “first epoch” was, of course, Meralco, acquired by the Lopezes from the American firm General Public Utilities in 1961.

The 10-year period following the acquisition — 1962 to 1972 — is known as the “golden age of Meralco.” In that period, Meralco put up one oil-fired power plant every 18 months, expanding its power generation capacity from 300,000 kilovolts to 1,500,000 kilowatts.

By 1966, Meralco had become the country’s largest private corporation in terms of assets.

In the 60s, Meralco customers were paying an average of only six centavos per kilowatt-hour for their electricity — among the lowest in the region (lower than in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Thailand, Singapore, and Malaysia, and lower than power rates in the US except for seven states).

But martial law intervened in 1972. Bent on crushing the Lopezes whom he feared and envied, the dictator Marcos took away Meralco from them and gave the major business component of power generation to the state firm Napocor.

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TAPPING MALAMPAYA: The second epoch was ushered in by the return of the Lopez Group to the power generation business after the 1986 People Power Revolt chased out Marcos.

The Group’s reentry was as lead private sector participants in the development of power plants using natural gas from the Malampaya fields.

The “Malampaya Deep Water Gas-to-Power” project was launched in the mid-90s to use the commercial quantities of natural gas discovered in Malampaya, Palawan. The project required the simultaneous development of the gas field, the pipeline infrastructure and the downstream facilities at an estimated cost of $4.5 billion.

The government appealed to the private sector to absorb half of the Malampaya field’s capacity of 3,000 megawatts, with the other half to be allocated to the Napocor.

Meralco stepped forward, turning to First Philippines Holdings Corp., its biggest private stockholders, to put up gas-powered plants whose output would be absorbed by Meralco.

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STABLE ENERGY: For Malampaya, First Holdings formed a joint venture with British Gas and the Meralco Pension Fund to form First Gas Holdings Corp.

First Gas went on to develop, finance and construct the twin San Lorenzo/Sta. Rita power plants.

San Lorenzo has a capacity of 500 megawatts while Sta. Rita can generate 1,000 megawatts for a combined output of 1,500 megawatts — exactly half of the load of 3,000 megawatts from natural gas to be extracted from Malampaya.

To underscore the importance of the San Lorenzo/Sta.Rita power projects, President Arroyo graced the inauguration of the San Lorenzo plant last Jan. 28, taking advantage of the occasion to unveil the Philippine Energy Plan for 2003-2012.

“I came to this inauguration because the San Lorenzo power plant has far-reaching implications to our national development,” the President said.

Stressing that “stable energy is an important institution of a strong Philippine Republic,” the President said the San Lorenzo plant would “be instrumental in bringing up our indigenous energy source level to more than 53 percent.”

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NEW AGE: Oscar Lopez says that, as seen in the San Lorenzo and Sta. Rita power plants, “no project is too impossible as long as the government and the private sector work hand-in-hand.”

Projects of such magnitude, Lopez says, “cannot succeed without the full support of the local and the national governments.”

He particularly commends the national leadership and the Department of Energy for their initiatives in promoting the Malampaya project.

Waxing poetic at the San Lorenzo inauguration, Lopez said the event represented “the dawning of a new age of clean, efficient and affordable power — from a fuel that burns with the promise of a brighter future and a world we can proudly pass on to the generation to come.”