Electrical power moving through transmission lines should remain below comfortable levels until around June this year when the Ilijan natural gas-fired power plant comes on line again, the Department of Energy (DOE) said on Tuesday.
DOE officials doubted a quick return to normal power supply levels from the various power generation companies enough to rule out red alert warnings and power interruptions of the like that occurred last Monday when parts of Metro Manila were without power just as the heat index soared.
Power demand across Luzon on Monday hit a high 12,418 megawatts, the highest since the start of the year. And yet, demand is forecast to elevate some more and hit 13,125 megawatts in the waning days of May, according to the DOE.
Energy Secretary Raphael Lotilla told reporters not a lot can be done to moderate the extreme temperatures reported across the country no matter that such has certainly affected the operating performance of the various power plants.
He said the outlook is for the Luzon grid to remain under yellow alert status from this point today to around mid-June. Intermittent yellow alerts are projected on certain days beginning August until November this year.
Still, Lotilla said 1,200 megawatt capacity provided by the Ilijan natural gas powered plant allows for the hope to persist in the months ahead that the power situation will imrove.
Apart from the phased return of the Ilijan power plant, the projected completion of the Mindanao-Visayas interconnection project in August will help stabilize supply.
Lotilla said eight power plant projects operating on coal, hydro, diesel and biomass present added capacity of 360.43 MW scheduled to start commercial operation this month until December.
Nevertheless, the DOE is bent on uncovering the root cause of Monday’s power supply outage ostensibly caused by a fault at the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) that then tripped the Masinloc coal-fired power plant.
DOE undersecretary Rowena Guevara said the NGCP) blamed the power outage to heavy rain and lightning hitting transmission line although NGCP would later bare the sequence of events that led to the 230 kilovolt Bolo-Masinloc line to trip.
“This line, N-1, operates with a redundancy. The load carried by line 2 was automatically transferred to line 1 when the former tripped. Each line is more than capable of singularly carrying the entire load of the Bolo-Masinloc 230kV facility at any time,” NGCP explained.
Thereafter, 2 of 3 Masinloc units with a total 630 MW tripped and forced an outage. The Luzon grid lost a total 1,354MW of power. But Bolo-Masinloc line 2 was immediately restored within 19 minutes and Masinloc unit 1 was successfully reintegrated although at a derated capacity.
