3 Mar 2014
Written by Recto Mercene with ANC/ABS-CBNnews.com
The Department of Energy warns rotational power interruptions will continue in Mindanao until 2015.
Energy Secretary Carlos Jericho L. Petilla said they are expecting two power plants to come onstream next year—a 350-megawatt (MW) facility from the Aboitiz group and a 200-MW plant from the Alcantara group—which should help address the supply shortage in the southern Philippines.
He added that this is why they have asked electric cooperatives to prepare contingency measures.
“We expected it to happen this year. In fact, I’m surprised people are bringing this up, the rotational brownouts in Mindanao, because based on our projection there is shortage of power in Mindanao until 2015 and we’ve been repeating that several times already,” he told ANC.
“Even without the blackout [on Thursday], we will have rotational brownouts,” he added.
Meanwhile, the Department of Energy appeals for understanding as it continues to look into last week’s Mindanao blackout.
Petilla said they have asked the Department of Science and Technology to come onboard to help them look for answers.
“People were saying, is there a sabotage? I said, this is not to hope for a sabotage. But if a tower is blown up, it’s easy to trace it. If a tree fell on a transformer, it’s physical. But if its electro-mechanical, you need all the data, you need all the logs of all the plants, all the logs of the NGCP [National Grid Corp. of the Philippines],” he said.
“The logs are in nanoseconds. Sabi nila nagsabay-sabay bumagsak ang planta. But when you look at the logs, hindi sabay-sabay. Some of them were split-seconds. On our end, hindi sabay-sabay ’yan. Titingnan namin ang sequence, down to the last nanosecond because it will spell the difference and give us answers,” Petilla added.
Parts of Mindanao suffered a blackout on Thursday, although the cause has yet to be determined. The suspected cause was equipment failure at a high-voltage switchyard, which then triggered the automatic shutdown of a nearby government-owned hydropower plant that draws its power from a dam. It then had a cascading effect on other power plants across the region.
TO address the lingering issue of power shortage in Mindanao, Malacañang said on Tuesday that the solution is to increase the baseload capacity by putting up more power generators and, at the same time, rehabilitate the Agus hydroelectric power plant in Lanao del Norte.
“That issue in Mindanao, what you really need is to increase the baseload capacity; you have to put up more power generators and remember our power plants—we need to rehabilitate, the Agus hydropower plants,” Palace Spokesman Edwin Lacierda said at news briefing.
Lacierda said the administration is building more power plants, the only way to increase the baseload capacity.
Mindanao had been suffering episodes of long, island-wide blackouts during the past months and authorities fail to determine the cause. source
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