President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. on Sunday said the government will intercede to address the persistent power outages in Negros and Panay islands reportedly caused by a failure in the distribution system.
This as Sen. Raffy Tulfo raised concern over the rotational brownouts in the two islands since April 27.
According to the President, it was ironic that Negros which actually has a power surplus, is experiencing brownouts due to a breakdown in the distribution lines attributed to faulty high tension wires. “So that’s what we will have to look into,” the President said in an interview with reporters onboard Air Force One.
According to reports, the islands of Guimaras, Panay, and Negros experienced a series of power outages last week.
The President said if the linemen of the privately owned utilities could not do the job, then the government has to step in.
Mr. Marcos added that the government was trying to manage both the country’s water and power supply.
He pointed out that the power outages resulted from the hot climate the country was experiencing at present.
The President also said that the government is doing its best to control the power consumption in the red power grid zones, as well as the water consumption.
“We are now trying to control or trying to manage rather our water consumption, our power consumption because that’s very closely related,” he said.
The government earlier acted on the power crisis in Occidental Mindoro with the activation of at least three power stations to provide 24-hour electricity in the province.
National Electrification Administration (NEA) chief Antonio Mariano Almeda reportedly met with Luis Manuel Banzon, owner of the Occidental Mindoro Consolidated Power Corporation (OMCPC), last April 27 to discuss measures to remedy the power crisis.
“In terms of Mindoro and even Marinduque, we’ve already been able to do some remedial measures,” he added.
Tulfo, chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy, said the power outages can possibly continue in the coming days.
He said he was informed that the rotational brownouts started due to the line fault or tripping in the transmission line of the National Grid Corporation (NGCP).
But the NGCP was blaming the Central Negros Electric Cooperative (CENECO) for the rotational brownouts, Tulfo said.
He had called the DOE (Department of Energy) and ERC (Energy Regulatory Commission) to investigate the problem and determine who’s responsible for this.
He noted that NGCP and CENECO were blaming one another for the problem.
The NGCP asserted that the problem was not on its side because the tripping or line fault allegedly originated from the line of CENECO, and that there was a domino effect that’s why their line was also affected, thereby causing power outages even in Panay.
But the NGCP told Tulfo that in cases like this wherein there was a line fault or tripping, there should be protection systems to prevent the fault from spreading.
While NGCP claimed that its protection system worked as intended, Tulfo questioned why Panay was affected even though its electricity was not being supplied by CENECO.