President Chang Joo-ok of East-West Power Co.

Korea East-West Power Co. (EWP) snatched the Presidential Award in the organization category of Korea National Quality Award at the 41st National Quality Management Convention at COEX Auditorium in Seoul on Nov. 18.

EWP was also put on the list of Excellent Quality Competitiveness Enterprise Prizes for the sixth consecutive year in the second-class public entity category.

EWP, spun off from KEPCO in 2001, is committed to ensuring an economical and stable supply of quality electricity through five power generation complexes, including Dangjin, Ulsan, Honam, Donghae and Ilsan thermal power complexes. The company is aggressively engaged in small hydro power, fuel cell, photovoltaic power, wind power and other new and renewable energies and overseas projects. EWP has a power generation capacity of 9,139MW, accounting for 9.8 percent of the Korean electricity market. True to the corporate vision “2030 Most Valuable Power Company,” EWP has set CEO management tenets as creativity and innovative management, transparency and principle management, communication and reliable management, future growth and global manpower development, sharing of values and shared growth. 

As part of its efforts to improve productivity, EWP conducted a productivity level evaluation and a management system analysis. EWP became the first Korean public entity to establish a system to improve productivity: exploring strategic tasks and establishing a roadmap for improving productivity, based on the outcomes of the evaluation and analysis. The company aims to ramp up productivity 30 percent and save an aggregate 415.3 billion won in costs by 2019. The company set 13 strategic tasks, including the spreading of a trouble-free power operation drive, in the capital, labor and knowledge areas. EWP has been consistently examined the results of the implementation after inaugurating a taskforce for pushing the improvement of productivity. 

Officials of Korea East-West Power pose after winning the Presidential Award in the organization category of Korea National Quality Award, the Excellent Quality Competitiveness Enterprise Prize, and other awards at the 41st National Quality Management Convention at COEX Auditorium in Seoul on Nov. 18.(Photo:EWP)

Establishing a Foundation for Sustainable Growth 

In an effort to ensure sustainable growth, EWP is implementing such projects as the construction of Dangjin Units 9&10, the nation’s 1,000MW thermal power plants, new and renewable energy projects as well as overseas projects without hitch. 

The GS Donghae Power Plant (595MWx2), the nation’s first large capacity private sector-public entity collaboration project, is under construction. As part of its efforts to comply with Renewable Energy Portfolio Standard (RPS) obligations and cut down on greenhouse gas emissions, EWP has spearhead state projects to develop new and renewable energies. To name a few, the company has dedicated the Donghae Biomass Plant with 30MW capacity, the largest-ever such unit in Korea, the 1MW-class photovoltaic power unit, the world’s largest-ever one, at the water intake channel of the Dangjin Thermal Power Complex, a move to diversify sites for installing photovoltaic power facilities, a 20MW photovoltaic power unit using automobile production facilities, the largest such one in Korea, and the Gyeongju wind power facility.

EWP is pushing for substantial growth by developing and operating overseas power projects. The company successfully completed a test-operation of the Nueva Ventanas Coal-fired Power Plant in Chile in 2008. Since then, EWP has landed such dozens of overseas projects as the Cebu operation and maintenance contract with the Philippines in 2009. The company is also expanding business areas overseas by participating in the management of power plants in such countries as Haiti, the United States and Jamaica, as the company made the most of the experiences it acquired while carrying out initial overseas projects.  

These are owed to EWP’s capitalizing of the expertise related to the construction and operation of world-class power plants in Korea the company has acquired and experiences on fluidized bed coal-fired plants and wind powers and systematic manpower specializing in overseas projects and its wide network of overseas projects.