Published
By Myrna Velasco
Forced outages in power
plants due to an array of technical glitches may persist until April 21, the
Department of Energy (DOE) said Thursday.
The 647-megawatt
generating unit 1 of the 1,200MW Sual coal-fired power plant – which tripped
due to “boiler circulating pump piping leak” that mainly triggered the
rotational brownouts in Luzon grid last Wednesday – is anticipated to be back
in the power system on April 13 (Saturday).
But the longest
generation facility to be on unplanned outage will be the 150MW unit 2 of the
South Luzon Power Generation Corp (SLPGC) of the Consunji group – which will
not be synchronized to the grid until April 21.
Like the Sual coal-fired power plant, the South Luzon Thermal Energy Corp
(SLTEC) generating unit 1 of 135MW capacity is targeted to be back in the power
grid on April 13, while Pagbilao unit 3 will back in operation on April 16.
When these power
facilities will be back to the grid, the DOE expects that power supply will
already be back to normal. This means that the declaration of yellow alerts may
already taper off unless the other plants will also encounter forced outages.
The power plants that
suffered operational malfunctions had been gridlocked with technical problems
ranging from boiler tube leak for SLTEC; vibration in primary air fan for
SLPGC; and boiler slagging for Pagbilao-3, according to the DOE. All three
coal-fired power assets are newly commissioned plants, and the generation
companies (GenCos) operating them are justifying that these technical hurdles
are often part of the initial setbacks in power plant operations.
With these unforced outages, Senator Sherwin T. Gatchalian, Senate Committee on
Energy chairman, wants to dig deeper into the causes.
He also wants to find
out if any of the industry players have had any attempt to “gouge” trading at
the Wholesale Electricity Spot Market (WESM) for them to financially benefit
from the naturally occurring consequence of price spikes.
But Gatchalian said he
will defer first to the DOE before taking action. From what it appears in
recent developments though, the DOE is more sympathetic to the generation
companies than the Filipino consumers who will eventually bear higher costs in
their electric bills because of these troubles in the electricity system.
“I call on the DOE to
immediately and thoroughly investigate these outages and to put contingency
measures in place to ensure that there will be no power interruptions during
election day,” Gatchalian said.
He also called on the DOE “to remain vigilant for possible collusion due to
thin electricity reserves in the midst of high demand.”
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