The Luzon grid’s tight power supply situation is expected to continue with the possibility of outages, with about 15 weeks of yellow alerts forecasted to occur for the rest of the year.
Energy Secretary Raphael Lotilla said the recent prolonged power outages in Panay and Negros, and the power interruption experienced were traced to “inadequacies in the transmission system.”
Lotilla said the government extended assistance to National Grid Corp. of the Philippines to speed up the completion of its transmission projects.
“Notwithstanding these efforts, these projects still have not been completed…We call on everyone’s cooperation in the completion of these projects and the identification of other critical transmission projects that need upgrading or rehabilitation,” Lotilla said.
“There is still a possibility [of red alert] like yesterday [Monday]. Remember, this is the first red alert for the year,” Department of Energy Undersecretary Rowena Guevara said during a briefing on Tuesday.
“We have potential yellow alerts for the entire month of May,” Guevara said, noting that this was the worst case scenario.
Apart from May, some weeks in June, August, September and October will also have yellow alerts, DOE data showed.
Guevara said the 1,200 megawatt Ilijan power plant in Batangas will help ease power supply once it comes online on May 26.
“If that power plant comes in, the yellow alerts will be reduced,” she said.
At 3:40 p.m. Tuesday, an automatic load dropping occurred in the Manila Electric Co. franchise area due to the tripping of the Duhat-Hermosa 230kV line. Service was restored by 3:57 p.m.
This affected more than 200,000 Meralco customers in portions of Paco and Sta. Mesa in Manila, Caloocan, Malabon, Batangas, Antipolo in Rizal, San Pedro and Biñan in Laguna, and San Rafael and Pulilan in Bulacan.
Lotilla said the support of the local governments and landowners in facilitating the construction of towers and distribution lines is equally essential.
“We will work with Congress to insure that performance standards are adhered to in order to provide an adequate power supply for our people,” the Energy chief said.
He said the Energy Regulatory Commission has finished its audit on NGCP’s performance.
“It is not a case of blame throwing. What we want to do is establish in an objective manner what are the weak links, what are the problems in the transmission system? And what can we do in order to address these problems,” Lotilla said.
The NGCP said its initial investigation of the Luzon red alerts on Monday showed that the Bolo-Masinloc 230kV Line 2 tripped.
NGCP said the line is N-1, or operates with a redundancy. The load carried by Line 2 was automatically transferred to Line 1 when the former tripped.
It said each of Lines 1 or 2 is more than capable to singularly carry the entire loading of the Bolo-Masinloc 230kV facility at any time.
Thereafter, two of three Masinloc Units (315MW x 2 units = 630MW) tripped. Together with other units already on forced outage, the total power lost to the grid was 1,354MW.