FQM Cobre Panama
Power Station Control System Integration, Commissioning Startup and Synchronisation
- Paco Plant, Cobre Panama Power Station
- I/O Count - 17,000
- Emerson Ovatio, Allen-Bradley PLCs
The Paco plant is a 300MW coal-fired power station with seawater cooling, consisting of 2 x 150MW turbines. This plant will provide base load to the Panamanian national grid and supply the Cobre Panama mine and mineral processing plant.
The site is 120km west of Panama City, remote from local support and presenting challenging logistics as well as climatic conditions. The site has required development of access, full port facilities, coal handling, and complete power station construction along with local camp, administration and warehousing.
Project scope
- Control System integration on site
- Construction support
- Control System Commissioning
- Power Station Startup
- National grid synchronisation
- Control System Support
Project highlights
- Mipac’s project team has interfaced across vendors, EPCM and construction organisations in this challenging location to integrate the control system to achieve commissioning, power station startup and synchronisation and delivery of power to the National grid
- First power from set 1 through to stable continuous 75MW production
- Operational support and production development continues for set 1
- Commissioning, startup and first power continues for set 2
Discover more of Mipac's projects
Greenfield mining projects shape operational performance for decades. The most successful plants are not defined by equipment alone, but by how they are designed to behave under real variability. Lessons from major projects show that stability, control quality, digital architecture and commissioning readiness must be engineered from day one to create future-ready, optimisation-capable operations.
When control philosophy drifts from plant reality, stability drops and APC underperforms. This article explains how drift develops in brownfield operations, the most reliable sequence to rebuild operating truth and why foundations matter more than dashboards for throughput, recovery and reliability.
Built to adapt, designed to perform With every update, MPA enhances how minerals processing operations monitor plant process, detect deviations, and respond. …