Secretary Raphael Lotilla yesterday said the Department of Energy (DOE) is verifying the cause of the simultaneous forced outages of several power plants in the Luzon Grid which went on unscheduled outages and deratings yesterday leading to a red alert in power supply.
Lotilla said there appears to be no fuel supply constraints that could have triggered the outages of some power generating plants servicing the Luzon Grid.
He said a team from the DOE will conduct actual physical spot checks and validate the condition of the transmission lines and the affected power plants,” Lotilla.
The outages occurred ahead of the DOE’s projected thin power supply reserves in the Luzon Grid next month.
Red alerts are declared when actual power supply against demand is insufficient and power interruptions are imminent.
According to the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP), a total of 4,509 megawatts (MW) were unavailable in the Luzon Grid yesterday.
Of that, 398 MW were from scheduled outages while 3,448 MW were due to power plants on unscheduled outages while the remaining 663 MW were due to deratings as several power plants also did not run on full capacity.
NGCP placed the Luzon Grid yesterday on red alert from 1 to 6 p.m. and on yellow alert from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 5 to 9 p.m.
Yellow alerts are issued when the level of power reserve in the grid is low
Last week, the DOE said the Luzon Grid has sufficient power supply in all other remaining weeks of the year.
During the power supply problem, the Manila Electric Co. (Meralco) also implemented its Interruptible Load Program (ILP) yesterday.
Meralco said that as of 2 p.m. yesterday, as much as 260 MW electricity were committed for de-loading.
Under the ILP, customers with large electricity consumption are encouraged to run their own generator sets whenever supply of electricity in the grid is short in exchange for monetary incentives.
The fuel they use in running their own power source are then paid by consumers.
