Election-day brownout feared: DOE appeals for longer poll holiday to boost power reserve

Published April 29, 2019, 6:58 PM By Myrna Velasco

https://news.mb.com.ph/2019/04/29/election-day-brownout-feared/

The Department of Energy (DOE) is pushing for a longer election holiday to ensure that the Luzon grid won’t suffer power interruptions or rotating brownouts while voting in precincts will be ongoing on May 13 and the subsequent counting and tallying of votes.

The DOE said that aside from the declaration of holiday on May 13, there might be a need to extend that to the next day to ensure brownout-free tallying of the votes cast.

It was learned that the declaration of May 14 as a holiday is being pushed so electricity demand may be eased while election results are not yet finalized.

Reliable electricity supply is very critical in upholding the integrity of the ballots because the voting process itself and the counting of votes are done electronically.

Just two weeks into the mid-term elections and Luzon grid was placed on “red alert condition” again on Monday (April 29), based on the advisory to stakeholders issued by system operator National Grid Corporation of the Philippines.

It has been noted that even on “low electricity demand” weekend, incidents of “yellow alerts” or strained power reserves are happening – and “red alert” is almost a constant phenomenon on weekdays when offices and most business establishments are on their regular operations.

With red alerts, wherein power reserves are crashed to zero or negative levels, Filipino consumers are just at the mercy of probable demand drop when temperatures get cooler so they can be spared from brownouts. Unfortunately, the system did not hold on Monday, hence, power interruptions still happened.

On April 29, a red alert was raised from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m., while a series of yellow alerts were set from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., 5 p.m., then from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m.

Areas affected with rotating brownouts starting at 1:32 p.m. on April 29 were: Valenzuela and Las Piñas in Metro Manila; San Pascual and Batangas City in Batangas; Bacoor, Tanza, and General Trias in Cavite; Majayjay, Luisiana, and Sta. Rosa in Laguna; and Lucban, Sampaloc, Tayabas, and Lucena in Quezon province.

Several plants were still on forced outages, with the unit 1 of South Luzon Thermal Energy Corporation (SLTEC) returning on a ‘technical breakdown state”; while the Sta. Rita gas-fired power plant of First Gen Corporation had been the new addition to the unplanned outages.

The plants with sustained forced outages had been the Calaca plant; the Limay plant of San Miguel group; and the GNPower plant of the

Ayala group. De-rated generating facilities had been Pagbilao 1 and 3; and the Malaya thermal plant of state-run Power Sector Assets Liabilities Management Corporation.

With these technical glitches in power plants persisting for more than a month already, Filipinos are not about to expect reliable supply soon – instead, their electric bills will also increase due to the tight supply conditions in the grid.