Power tripping

By Benedicto Q Sánchez

Friday, May 10, 2013

WHO can blame netizens from smelling a rat with the Luzon-wide blackout the other day? Residents of Metro Manila and areas of northern and central Luzon vented their outrage at Wednesday’s blackout.

The atmosphere last Wednesday was rife with conspiracy theories at the simultaneous emergency shutdown of six power plants. The National Grid Corp. of the Philippines twitted on social media that 3,700 megawatts went offline, “that NGP’s transmission lines are secure and fully functional. It will dispatch available capacities once the power plants are restored and online.” In other words, there was nothing wrong with its transmission lines but with the power plants.

On the other hand, Energy Secretary Jericho L. Petilla has another take on the outage. He said a repetition was unlikely. “[Six] power plants bogging down [at the same time] is extremely unlikely and it did not happen today, because it was the lines that caused the brownouts, not the power plants.”

But Petilla seemed to contradict himself. He assured the voters of “ample” energy supply on Election Day since it would be a holiday and industries would be closed—implying that the power outage was caused by “heavy consumption of power.” According to him, power losses could be caused by heavy consumption or the lines that caused the power tripping.

No wonder these conflicting official stories failed to allay fears that something could be afoot. The United Nationalist Alliance expressed fears that a similar, or worse, power disruption could happen on Election Day.

There, UNA spokesperson Toby Tiangco said what was in the minds of many Filipinos: “I hope this is not a dry run for the May 13 elections.”
Bayan Muna Rep. Neri Colmenares expressed his worries, because he said the Comelec had no emergency plans for running the automated voting machines if another blackout occurs. “President Aquino should have the source of the blackout investigated and should see to it that it would not be repeated on Election Day.”

Comelec chief Sixto Brillantes Jr. assured voters that polling centers will be provided with power generators as a back-up measure of another blackout. “In fact, we have many extra gensets that we can bring all over the Visayas but we have distributed at least one for every municipality,” he insisted.

Nice to hear of such preparations for E-Day for the Visayas. But is this a case of Luzon last Wednesday, Visayas next Monday? Is Brillantes implying that Visayans can expect power outages on election day?
Here in Bacolod, CENECO has been irritating its consumers with intermittent brownouts almost on a daily basis. It’s almost like that power utility is depriving us of power not just at election time but any time. Can you imagine the sacrifices Bacoleños have to endure when that happens?

And on a different note on power outages, it seems the BACIWA has jumped into the wagon on making its consumers’ lives miserable. Synchronized with the blackout in Luzon was the brownout at the Felisa-Handumanan area, the water sources for those living in Alijis.

Or so said Angelie González of BACIWA when I called up to complain the lack of water. It takes some time to start-up the pump. Hey, don’t blame BACIWA, blame CENECO. Alijis gets it water from Felisa-Handumanan, it needs power to pressurize the pumps and on the local power utility for electric power.

I checked the websites of CENECO and BACIWA to confirm what I had been told. Nothing there, No brownout at the Felisa-Handumanan area, and no explanation why we had no BACIWA water.

These two companies don’t even bother to explain why they deprive services to paying consumers. I consider the silence and lousy services of these public utilities to their Bacolod consumers: power tripping to show who’s the boss of consumers.  source

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