The Department of Energy is hopeful there will be no outages during the election period as contingency measures have been put in place to ensure reliable power supply.
“We are very confident. Aside from being confident, we have to be prepared for any contingency. We need to be able to immediately respond,” Energy Undersecretary Felix William Fuentebella said Friday.
He said the strategy involved prioritizing certain areas like canvassing and polling centers and closely coordinating with the Commission on Elections (Comelec).
“If rotational outages are implemented—we’ll focus on polling centers and canvassing centers…We’re not saying that that is the general picture, what we’re saying is we are prepared for any contingency,” the energy official said.
He gave assurances that DOE and others were working to ensure available supply.
Mario Marasigan, director of DOE’s Power Bureau, said they had identified several contingencies such as delaying the maintenance schedule of large hydro power plants, transfer of supply from Visayas to Luzon and the commissioning of the GNPower Dinginin unit 2 with a capacity of 668 MW.
He said the power generators were committed to make available all optimized capacities while at least 400 MW of battery storage were also undergoing testing and commissioning.
For the Visayas, 70 MW diesel gensets are on hand and ready to go into the system, he said.
“We are still collating how many RE, batteries, and including Mariveles plant since it can contribute 150 MW,” Marasigan said.
He said Manila Electric Co. had been in talks with participants of the interruptible load program who were ready to deload about 500 MW of capacity if needed.
Marasigan said they would meet with Meralco to further increase the ILP participants.
The officials reiterated calls for energy efficiency and conservation during the dry months when demand is high.
