The Luzon grid was plunged into red alert power supply status for a few hours on Friday due to the isolation of power plants arising from the tripping of a transmission line, officials said.
System operator National Grid Corp. of the Philippines placed the Luzon grid on red alert from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. after available capacity reached 9,083 MW against the peak demand of 9,051 MW.
“Luzon grid is on red alert due to the unexpected shutdown of some power plants,” National Grid said.
Red alert refers to the system condition where the contingency reserve is zero or a generation deficiency exists.
“NGCP’s Pagbilao-Tayabas 230 kV line tripped at 8:38 a.m. causing the isolation of power plants with a combined capacity of 947 MW,” NGCP said.
NGCP said the loss of power prompted the grid operator to put the Luzon grid on red alert from 11 to 12:30 p.m. and yellow alert from 12:31 p.m. to 8 p.m.
“The said line was restored at 9:24 a.m.. Line personnel are already on line patrol to investigate the root cause of the incident,” it said.
Manila Electric Co. spokesman Joe Zaldarriaga said the red alert in the company’s Meralco franchise area lasted from 1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. when demand was expected to be at its peak.
Meralco initially attributed the generation deficiency on Friday to the sudden outage of the Pagbilao and Quezon Power Philippines power plants.