Mindanao power woes continue; rates expected to increase

Sunstar Davao

GENERAL SANTOS CITY -- The business sector has warned of higher power rates in Mindanao with the Department of Energy whacked for apparently misleading on the supply situation that triggered anew rotational brownouts in parts of the Southern Philippines.

Manuel F. D. Yaphockun, one of the directors of the General Santos City Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Inc., castigated the Energy department, stressing it has not been truthful about the electricity situation in Mindanao.

"As of 3 p.m. on October 9, the deficit reached 400 megawatts, only 200 MW less than the brownouts early this year," he said in a letter distributed among the local business community.

This city, the "Tuna Capital of the Philippines", gave the South Cotabato Electric Cooperative II (Socoteco II) only 67 MW from the usual 100 MW because of the power supply deficit Mindanao is suffering, he added.

Yaphockun warned that prices of electricity are expected to go up even more as more expensive sources of electricity such as power barges and diesel plants have to be purchased in order to stabilize the supply situation in the island.

In a statement last week, Energy Secretary Jose Rene D. Almendras said the agency was determined to solve Mindanao's power woes.

Explaining the recurring outages in the island, the Energy department said they discovered that power from hydro-resources specifically Pulangui IV has not been fully utilized because portion of the capacity is used as spinning reserves and NGCP has not dispatched their full capacity because of the same reasons.

A spinning reserve is any back-up energy production capacity which can be made available to a transmission system with ten minutes' notice and can operate continuously for at least two hours once it is brought online.

On the other hand, Therma Marine Inc.'s power barges, with a combined 200 MW output, cannot be utilized in full because of NGCP's current Ancillary Services Procurement Agreement. Only half of its total capacity, 100 MW can be readily used. However, distribution utilities in Mindanao still have to contract this 100 MW from TMI., the DoE's statement read.

Yaphockun, meanwhile, warned consumers to brace for longer brownouts, with the worst expected to hit the city during the summer of 2011, with no new generating capacity going on stream by then.

To offset the effect of the power outages, however, Mr. Yaphockun urged the cleaning and check-up of existing generators used by business establishments.

Based on the joint advisory of the National Grid Corp of the Philippines and Socoteco II, brownouts have hit the cooperative's coverage areas starting October 1 and will continue until October 17, with the outages lasting from 10 to 14 hours per substation.

Geronimo Desesto, Socoteco II manager for institutional services department, said the outages have been due to "preventive maintenance."

The electric distributor serves the entire General Santos City, the whole Sarangani province and parts of South Cotabato.

As of Sunday, Mindanao has available capacity of 1,063 MW as against a peak load of 1,171 MW, or a supply shortfall of 108 MW, the website of NGCP showed.

In the first half of the year, daily power outages in some parts of Mindanao lasted for 12 hours, with the deficiency blamed on the El Nino phenomenon that caused the decline of water level that significantly reduced the production capacity of hydropower plants in the island.
More than half of the power supply in Mindanao comes from hydropower plants.

Published in the Sun.Star Davao newspaper on October 12, 2010.