Mindanao Power Supply Woes Ease

Manila Bulletin

By MYRNA M. VELASCO

November 5, 2012, 5:07pm
Power supply in Mindanao will start easing this week with the return-to-operation of the 210-megawatt Steag coal-fired power plant in Misamis Oriental.In a press statement, facility operator Steag Sate Power Inc. announced that its Unit 1 started getting back on stream Sunday (November), and was already ramped up to its full capacity of 105MW.
“The operation of Unit 1 is expected to improve the precarious power supply condition of Mindanao,” the company has emphasized. It reportedly went back to operation at least 10 hours ahead of schedule.
For the plant’s Unit 2, Steag said it is now undergoing similar preventive maintenance schedule (PMS), but is targeted to be back on-line around November 10.
The operating company explained that it was the first time it undertook a “relatively long planned outage” in the past six years or since the plant was commissioned in 2006.
It added that “the timing of the PMS takes into consideration the power plant’s operations and maintenance guidelines as well as the projected electricity demand-supply condition of Mindanao during the period.”
The operating firm stressed that “the overarching goal is to minimize the possible adverse impact of power supply shortfall in the island.”
All throughout its operations, Steag emphasized that it attained a high of 93.3-percent availability rate, hence, contributing significantly to the power needs of the supply-snarled grid. The plant’s outage rate was also reported at a fairly low 1.0-percent.
Steag thus noted that even with the lengthened interval of its plant’s shutdown, it is still targeting to “achieve an availability rate of 91-percent by the end of 2012.”
Within the six-year stretch, the plant noted that it so far delivered 8.3-billion kilowatt hours and that accounted for roughly 20-percent of Mindanao power supply.
Having been running at a different technology rather than the hydro-based traditional power source of Mindanao, it was noted that the facility helped in the diversification of the grid’s power mix. (MMV)   source