Grupo Dragon reports start of 5 MW geothermal plant in Mexico earlier this year
Cerro Grande en Nayarit, Mexico (Source: Flickr, CC, By: Christian Frausto Bernal)
Alexander Richter
22 May 2015
The new plant in San Pedro Lagunillas (Nayarit) is expected to double its output shortly and eventually reach 50MW in 2 years.
Grupo Dragon (GD), a subsidiary of Grupo Salinas Energy in Mexico, made its debut earlier this year with a new geothermal power plant going online in Nayarit with an output of 5 MW which is expected to double in the coming days according to local newspapers. The same sources state that GD’s plant output is expected to increase to 25 MW in the summer of the following year and eventually reach 50 MW in two year’s time, becoming the first geothermal plant operated by a private firm in the country. This will likely give them a competitive advantage to ally with Mexico’s Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) for future projects.
Jose Pablo Fernandez, CEO of GD, told local newspaper “El Economista” that even though the firm has kept a low profile; in October last year they started testing for commercial operations of this new plant in San Pedro Lagunillas, Nayarit, which began selling its energy in January. The total investment was of 2,600 million pesos. (USD $170m)
The project began six years ago after receiving a “self-supply permit” by the Energy Regulatory Commission to sell power to the municipalities of Jalisco and Nayarit.
GD is grooming a team of at least 100 specialists to review projects already in operation that the government is not assigning to the incoming geothermal Round Zero, and intends to seek public-private partnerships with state-owned entity CFE aiming to obtain exploration permits and concessions for a period of 30 years, to exploit geothermal energy on their own terms in the coming decades.
GD is targeting around half of CFE’s 450 megawatts of installed capacity since they have little competition in the market.
Source: El Economista
