By Danessa Rivera (The
Philippine Star) | Updated August 25, 2016 - 12:00am
MANILA, Philippines – First Gen
Corp. assured the 1,000-megawatt (MW) Santa Rita Combined Cycle Power Plant
would stand ready to resume supply to the Luzon grid after one transformer of
the facility tripped while undergoing a one-month scheduled maintenance.
The company disclosed it is
investigating a fault which occurred at the main generator transformer of Unit
20 of the Sta. Rita plant.
“Investigation is ongoing to confirm
the condition of the transformer. If necessary, FGPC can immediately deploy its
spare main generator transformer which is stored at the Santa Rita Power Plant
site,” First Gen said.
Unit 20 is one of four units of the
Santa Rita Power Plant of First Gen subsidiary First Gas Power Corp. (FGPC).
The unit is under scheduled maintenance
outage from July 23 to Aug. 26 for works including maintenance activities.
Unit 20 of the Sta. Rita plant was
among the nine power plants that were out when a series yellow and red alerts
were raised in the Luzon grid by the National Grid Corp. of the Philippines
from July 25 to 29.
A yellow alert status means that
contingency reserves are below the minimum level set by the regulator but does
not necessarily lead to power outages. The power reserve should be equivalent
to the largest unit of a running power plant, or in this case, the 647-MW
unit of Sual power plant.
Because of this, the Department of
Energy (DOE) asked the Energy Regulatory Commission to investigate whether
power players employed anti-competitive behavior which led to deficient power
supply during the period.
The DOE has also initiated the
formation of technical audit teams which will validate the figures submitted by
the generating companies and the distribution utilities which will be used in
the delivery of quality, reliable, secure and affordable supply of energy.
No comments:
Post a Comment