North Cotabato braces for 7-10 hours of rotating blackouts every day

Business MirrorPublished on Wednesday, 20 March 2013 19:12

KIDAPAWAN CITY—Businessmen and power consumers in North Cotabato are again bracing for longer brownouts as one of the units of the privately owned diesel-fired power plants in Compostela Valley underwent immediate repairs starting on Tuesday, a spokesman for an electric cooperative said.

Vicente Baguio, a spokesman for the Cotabato Electric Cooperative (Cotelco) Main, said that starting on Wednesday, the rotating blackouts in their service areas would last up to seven hours as one of the engines of the diesel-fired power plants of the Therma Marine Inc. (TMI) in Maco, Compostela Valley, bogged down after longer usage.

Wilfredo Rodolfo, TMI’s corporate communications head, confirmed the reports, saying the company had to cut off part of the power distributed to electric cooperatives and other companies when one of the barges of their diesel-fired plants in Maco town shut down.

Rodolfo said the barge’s capacity is 50 megawatts (MW). He cited longer usage as the primary reason for the shutdown.

“These diesel-fired power plants are designed only as peaking plants, meaning, they are only used when the Mindanao grid needs additional power during peak hours. But since 2010, these plants are into 24-hour operation, which is already beyond their capacity,” he said.

The TMI, a subsidiary of the Aboitiz Power Corp., produces 200 MW from its power barges in Nasipit, Agusan del Norte, and in Maco, Compostela Valley.

The two diesel-fired power barges of TMI are running 24 hours every day to try to meet the power demand from Mindanao’s electric cooperatives.

These barges supply power to 23 electric cooperatives and distribution utilities in Mindanao in addition to the supply provided for by state-owned National Power Corp.-Power Sector Assets Liabilities and Management.

The Cotelco-Main, service provider for 12 towns and one city in North Cotabato province, used to buy additional 8-MW power from TMI.

But since Tuesday, the electric co-op is only given 6 MW, which is 25 percent less of the total supply of power the Cotelco gets from the TMI. This means that from four hours, the rotating blackouts would last to seven hours a day.

The power situation is worse in five towns in North Cotabato, which is part of the service areas of the sub-station of the Cotelco at the Pigcawayan-Pikit-Aleosan-Libungan-Midsayap Area, where rotating blackouts could last at least 10 hours a day.   source 

PNA