Plant shutdowns stretch brownouts to 6 hours

Manila Bulletin
by Myrna Velasco
July 18, 2014

Power plants on scheduled and forced outages had stretched rotating blackouts up to six hours on Friday within the franchise area of the Manila Electric Company (Meralco), causing even deeper desperation to electricity consumers.

The utility firm announced that electricity service was ready to be restored to roughly 90-percent of its customers, but deficient electricity supply still prompted the enforcement of manual load dropping (MLD) or scheduled brownouts of 5-6 hours at its service area.

As of 12:55pm yesterday, data gathered from system operator National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) showed that available capacity was just at 4,745 megawatts versus demand of 4,604 MW. Forecast demand for the period had been placed at 5,813MW.

Capacities of power plants which were out from the system include: Unit 2 of Sual plant at 647MW; the 1,000-MW Santa Rita and 500-MW San Lorenzo gas plants; Unit 2 of Calaca plant at 300MW; Pagbilao Units 1 and 2 with 764MW capacity; and the 509-MW capacity of Quezon Power plant.

Repair and restoration even of the high-voltage transmission lines were accelerated, but the unavailability of supply still placed Luzon grid on ‘red alert status’, hence, the scheduling of rotating brownouts.

According to power plant operator TeaM Energy Philippines, Unit 1 of the Pagbilao plant was on scheduled outage but was targeted to be synchronized back to the grid Saturday (July 19).

For Unit 2 of the Sual plant in Pangasinan, it was on forced tripping as of 3:00am Friday, but repairs were undertaken anticipating that it would be brought back to operation latter part of the day.

Santa Rita and San Lorenzo plants advised of damage sustained from the strike of typhoon Glenda. Facility owner and operator First Gen Corporation had informed the Department of Energy (DOE) on possible return to operation also this Saturday.

A monitoring report released by the energy department indicated that most of Meralco’s service areas in Metro Manila were already 65-percent to 100-percent re-energized, as well as those in Bulacan and Rizal.

For the hardest-hit areas of Quezon, Cavite and the Bicol region, Energy Secretary Carlos Jericho L. Petilla has apprised media that power supply restoration shall be done gradually – but the bad news is, brownouts might linger for grueling two weeks. source