The Department of Energy said Monday it forecasts the entire fourth week of May to experience yellow alerts and is banking on demand side management to bring down consumption, thus avoiding red alerts or outages.
“The Luzon grid is expecting to reach 13,125-megawatt peak demand for 2023 (which may occur on Week 21 or last week of May 2023),” DOE Undersecretary Rowena Cristina Guevarra said in a briefing.
“Factoring in the projected forced outage ranging from 500 MW to 600 MW for the entire year, along with the operation of existing power plants and committed power plants, the Luzon grid is projected to have zero red alert and 12 yellow alerts,” Guevarra said.
The yellow alerts are forecasted to occur in the following dates—March 12 to 18, March 26 and April 1, April 23 to 29, entire May, June 1 to June 10, August 17 to September 2, October 15 to 21, and November 19 to 25.
Guevarra hopes there will be no sudden outage of large power plants, which could trigger a red alert and implement manual load dropping leading to power outages.
“Yellow alert, but if there is one plant that goes down, we might have a red alert,” the official said.
Guevarra said there are around 1,074 MW power projects expected for completion this year, adding that many RE projects in the pipeline were delayed.
“If we did not have the pandemic, our RE sources would have been online,” she said.
The Energy official urged the public to conserve electricity and implement energy efficiency measures to reduce demand and avoid running the more expensive diesel plants.
“If we operate diesel power plants at 420 MW, the number of yellow alerts go down to 1 from 12…But running diesel power plants is very expensive and will mean an increase in cost per kilowatt-hour. Thus, we suggest demand-side management,” Guevarra said.
Energy Secretary Raphael Lotilla said demand-side management is necessary in managing the country’s power supply.
DSM focuses on utilizing energy-efficient equipment and appliances and promoting and implementing policies and programs that best fit each industry.
“Let’s save electricity usage so we won’t need additional plants. If our consumption becomes more efficient, we do not need to run the diesel-fired power plants, which are more expensive,” Lotilla said.
Lotilla said power plant construction takes time and cannot be done overnight.
“That’s what we are trying to address in the medium to long term, the power plants that we need to build,” he said.