Published March 4, 2019, 3:52 PM By Myrna Velasco
The Department of Energy (DOE) has
assured stable power supply during the May election period across different
power grids – given the comprehensive collaboration it has been pursuing with
various industry stakeholders.
According to DOE Assistant Secretary
Redentor E. Delola, the agency looked at the power supply-demand scenarios in
Luzon, Visayas and Mindano grids; and so far the outlooks have been promising.
He explained that they have factored
in the capacity additions coming from committed power plants and the scheduled
maintenance shutdowns of generating facilities, as well as the intermittency
facet of variable renewable energy (VRE) assets.
Nevertheless, Delola noted that they
have not integrated yet the forced outages in their scenario-setting. Despite
that, however, he opined that power supply during the election period will
generally be on the safe side.
The energy official further
emphasized that part of the contingency measures will be ensuring that power
plants will have minimal forced outages – but even if there shall be unexpected
occurrences in the power system, he asserted that the historical average of
unplanned plant shutdowns had just been only 300 megawatts on the average.
On the scheduled maintenance
downtime of power generating facilities, the scale that will be taken out from
the system will be 382MW staring this March; and the higher end will just be at
700 to 800MW until mid-year.
The maintenance shutdown of some
power plant units, however, will be aptly compensated by the additional
capacities that will be integrated into the system within this semester.
Within March and April this year in
particular for the Visayas grid, there will be guaranteed supply buffer of
300MW with the entry of the two generating units of Therma Visayas Inc., the
new coal-fired power plant of the Aboitiz group in Cebu.
Energy Undersecretary Felix William
B. Fuentebella added that if there will be untoward incidents that could affect
power supply, Luzon per se could still count on up to 200MW of power import
from the Visayas grid plus additional 150MW generation that could come from the
Malaya thermal plant in Rizal.
Beyond the guarantee of power supply
sufficiency, the energy department has also been watching over security
concerns in the power system – so interruptions induced either at distribution
and transmission networks can be avoided.
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