The Energy Regulatory Commission is investigating why several power plants remained offline on Thursday, prompting the continued issuance of red and yellow alerts in Luzon and Visayas.
“Based on our findings, we will formalize the investigation to determine compliance or noncompliance by the relevant stakeholders and implement appropriate measures to impose penalties,” ERC chair Monalisa Dimalanta said.
The ERC still could not determine why the National Grid Corp. of the Philippines (NGCP) placed Luzon and Visayas under red and yellow alerts for the third straight day on Thursday.
The NGCP said the available supply in Luzon was 13,397 megawatts with peak demand pegged at 12,892MW, while in the Visayas, the available capacity was 2,410MW while the peak demand was estimated at 2,354MW.
Unavailable to the Luzon grid is 1891.3MW, as 19 power plants are on forced outage while one is running on derated capacity. In the Visayas, 13 power plants are on forced outage (unscheduled shutdown), while nine are running on derated capacities, resulting in 696.7MW lost supply.
The Department of Energy earlier said that the high temperatures have been affecting the operations of power plants as it reminded generation companies to comply with rules on plant maintenance schedules, which prohibits power facilities, except hydroelectric power plants, from conducting any maintenance shutdowns during summer months.
The past few days of red and yellow alerts have been stressful for Filipinos, who are wholly dependent on the national grid for electricity to power almost everything in homes, offices, and industries all over the land. The power sector had decades to continuously build and improve in order to prevent the miserable situation we find ourselves in now. With a robust and reliable power infrastructure, from the generation units, to the transmission grid, distribution lines, all the way to our individual electric meters, yellow and red alerts wouldn’t be necessary.
But now, we have more than 30 power plants unable to produce the power expected from them, and even if the intense heat the entire nation is experiencing is a factor, those in the power sector should’ve been more prepared with countermeasures and initiatives that could mitigate the impact of the weather on their duty to produce the electricity that the country desperately needs.
Government needs to get to the bottom of this failure, not to penalize those who have failed us, but also to ensure that this sort of massive shortcoming never happens again. Because if nothing happens, we might have to prepare for this power problem every year.*
