The Department of Energy (DOE) said the country is not yet out of the woods in terms of power supply sufficiency for the hot dry months as red and yellow alerts may persist until next month.
Meanwhile, the Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) said it has summoned officials of six generation companies to provide more information on the recent outages of their power plants.
“In the next few weeks (or) until the middle of May, we are going to have yellow alerts and possibly red alerts in some areas. If none of our plants are going to go offline, then perhaps it’s just yellow alert,” said DOE Undersecretary Rowena Guevara, in a virtual briefing yesterday.
“In the last weeks, several plants went offline and that resulted in red alerts. That one we cannot predict. We can only predict the demand increase based on the heat index and there will be yellow alerts based on the heat index alone,” Guevara added.
Yellow alerts are issued when the level of power reserve in the grid is low while red alerts are declared when actual power supply against demand is insufficient and power interruptions are imminent.
Both the Luzon and Visayas power grids were again placed under yellow alert as of 8 a.m. yesterday as 56 power plant units were on either forced outage or de-rated with a total unavailable capacity of 2,095.1 megawatts (MW).
Yellow alert was raised in the Luzon Grid yesterday from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. and from 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. as 19 power plant units were on forced outage and one more with de-rated capacities resulted in the unavailability of 1,424.3 MW in the region.
Meanwhile, yellow alert was also raised in the Visayas Grid from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. and from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. and from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. as 24 power plant units were on forced outage and 12 more with de-rated capacities for a total lost capacity of 670.8 MW in the region.
According to the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines, the alerts were raised as available capacity in the Luzon Grid was only at 14,568 MW compared to a peak demand of 13,941 MW.
Available capacity in the Visayas Grid was only 2,829 MW against a peak demand of 2,555 MW.
DOE Secretary Raphael Lotilla said the effects of El Niño could be considered a “calamity” since these “created problems not only in the energy sector but in the agriculture sector, water, health, education and so on.”
The DOE said the government is responding to the issue “as needed,” noting there are at least 4,164.92 MW of power projects will come online this yea. To date, 161.20 MW of these committed projects are now in full commercial operation while 835.888 MW are under the testing and commissioning stage.
These power projects represent a mix of both renewable and conventional sources as baseload plants will comprise around 678.06 MW while mid-merit plants will total to 1,320
MW and peaking plants will comprise 2,164.92 MW.
Of the expected capacities, 4,030 MW are in Luzon, 80.25 MW are in Visayas and 52.50 MW are in Mindanao. In terms of the timeline, 1,224.655 MW will operate in the second quarter, 1,352.167 MW in the third quarter and 1,571.154 MW in the fourth quarter. At least 590 MW of battery energy storage system will also come online this year, with 32.42 MW already operational.
Meanwhile, the ERC said it expects to have preliminary findings on its probe on the power plant outages by the first week of May.
Last year, the ERC imposed approximately P60 million in penalties on 14 generation companies for breaching the allowable number of outage days. Ninety-five generation companies remain under investigation for exceeding the outage allowances, to determine if these outages are justified or excused.
The ERC has also been monitoring the prices in the Wholesale Energy Spot Market (WESM) over the last ten days which showed increases as well.
