Business World Online
Posted on February 28, 2014 08:30:54 PM
Residents in Mindanao continue to experience up to three hours of rotating brownouts pending the return to operations of a 210-megawatt (MW) coal-fired power plant in Misamis Oriental, officials told reporters on Friday.
The officials said that 80-85% of the power supply in Mindanao has been restored.
“All the power transmission and distribution facilities have been restored. All power plants except STEAG are already up and running,” Energy Secretary Carlos Jericho L. Petilla said in a briefing held at the department’s headquarters in Bonifacio Global City.
“There are still brownouts because of STEAG, which [generates] more than 200 MW. [That translates to] around two-to-three hour rotating brownouts until STEAG is back,” said Eugene H. Bicar, National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) head for Mindanao Systems Operations, said during the same briefing.
Mr. Bicar said the coal plant was running normally before the blackout, but after tripping, it had some technical problems that resulted in its inability to be synchronized to the grid.
“They’re still looking at when it will resume. They haven’t identified the cause yet. They said they’re going to get some consultants,” the official added.
Mr. Bicar traced the outage to a malfunction of one of the circuit breakers of the Agus 1 hydroelectric power plant in Lanao del Sur. “The malfunction at Agus 1 triggered the collapse of all generation facilities in Mindanao,” Mr. Bicar said.
He clarified that the NGCP’s transmission facilities were not at fault as these were already fully restored by noon yesterday.
EQUIPMENT MALFUNCTION
The exact cause of Agus 1’s equipment malfunction was yet to be determined. “This is still subject for further investigation. We will have to collect all the data from individual reports of Napocor (National Power Corp.), NGCP, and the other power plant owners,” Mr. Petilla said. These reports are expected to be submitted by Monday, the official said.
Meanwhile, Napocor President Gladys Cruz-Sta. Rita said that the Agus 1 hydro plant is already back to operating normally.
“We are also finalizing the data that we will submit. We are going to dig deeper to see what went wrong,” Ms. Cruz-Sta. Rita.
Ms. Cruz-Sta. Rita also acknowledged the inefficiency of some of Agus 1’s facilities because of “old age.”
The 80-MW plant forms part of the Agus-Pulangi hydroelectric power plant complex, which supplies more than half of Mindanao’s power needs.
“We are actually looking at new equipment for installation in Agus 1. Our people are also checking the maintenance,” Ms. Cruz-Sta. Rita said.
“NGCP and Napocor agreed to review the protection settings so that this won’t happen again,” she added.
Mr. Petilla also emphasized that problems in power facilities are inevitable.
“While we have a regular maintenance program, some of those [facilities] are really old. So the problem could be electrical in nature. These are the things that happen every now and then,” the Energy chief said. “We try to prevent all of these but if for some reason, it happens again, the most important [thing] is how quickly we can restore the power,” he added.
Mr. Petilla said it will coordinate with Napocor and other concerned agencies to determine the cause of the problem and come up with the solution.
“It could be because of the old facilities. But before we replace them, we should first check and evaluate if that’s really the cause. The technical people will be there to evaluate that,” he said.
“We will see if there’s negligence or just electrical problem,” he added.
DAVAO’S ROTATING BROWNOUT
Meanwhile, the Davao Light and Power Co., a subsidiary of Aboitiz Power Corp., announced late Thursday that there would be hour-long rotating power outages within its franchise area. This came after the NGCP asked the city’s power utility to reduce its load due to the insufficient supply in the Mindanao grid.
Details of the rotating brownout, however, have yet to be provided by the company even as it noted such a measure is necessary to avoid a collapse of the Mindanao transmission grid. Davao Light’s franchise area takes up as much as a fourth of the grid’s supply estimated at roughly 1,300 megawatts (MW).
This is the first time Davao Light announced a rotating brownout since the long dry spell in 2010 that disrupted the operation of Mindanao’s power generation capacity. Under the worst scenario then, the city’s downtown where most businesses are located suffered an hour without power during the day while areas outside downtown had to endure two hours without electricity.
The firm said it is doing its best to reduce the adverse impact of the situation, noting it has embedded power sources that it could harness in the near term. These are the company’s 40-MW standby diesel plant at Bajada, and the Hedcor Sibulan and Talomo hydropower plants which could provide about the same amount of power.
LIGHTS OFF
The Energy department failed to meet its target of full power restoration within the same day of the system-wide outage.
All power plants in Mindanao -- which had a combined dependable capacity of 1,100-1,200 MW on Thursday -- went offline because of the outage.
Power was immediately restored in major cities in Mindanao -- including Davao, General Santos, Zamboanga, Pagadian and Cagayan de Oro -- according to the NGCP.
The Energy chief also warned of power shortages in the upcoming summer months in the wake of the blackout. He had said on Thursday that there will be a shortage of up to 150-MW, equivalent to three-hour rotating brownouts.
LUZON BLACKOUT
The massive outage came less than a year after significant parts of Luzon experienced a major power outage on May 8, 2013 that lasted for almost 10 hours. The cause of that outage was attributed to the malfunction of a transmission line, which in turn bogged down six major power plants in Luzon. The plants’ shutdown resulted in the loss of 3,700-MW in the Luzon grid -- almost half of the 8,300 MW peak demand in the island.
The NGCP tracked the problem to a unit of the 600-MW Calaca plant in Batangas, which tripped along with the Calaca-Biñan 230-kilovolt transmission line.
Besides the Calaca plant, the other major plants affected were identified as the 1,200-MW Ilijan, 1,000-MW Sta. Rita and 500-MW San Lorenzo natural gas power plants in Batangas City; the 460-MW Quezon coal-fired power plant in Mauban Quezon; and the 1,218-MW Sual coal-fired power plant in Pangasinan. -- Claire-Ann Marie C. Feliciano source
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