-Macon Ramos Araneta
The Institute for Climate and Sustainable Cities (ICSC) warned of threats of power outages and continued increasing power rates, especially in the next two months due to the maintenance shutdown of baseload power plants.
“Are we still expecting power outages? The answer is yes because multiple plants show recurring power outages and some of them are still on shutdown up to this date,” Jephraim Manansala, ICSC chief data scientist said.
Manansala said the tight power supply and high fuel prices also were causing high electricity rates.
He cited outages of large coal-powered plants in the first quarter of this year up to today, despite the Grid Operating and Maintenance Program (GOMP) approved by the Department of Energy, allowing planned and scheduled outages only until March 25, 2022.
He said the approved GOMP of grid operator National Grid Corp. of the Philippines required all coal-fired power plants to be available during the dry months.
“However, from the recent operational data of these power plants, data shows they may not be available because of the recurring forced outages. We have seen plenty of them to be non compliant to the scheduled outages to the GOMP,” he said.
Meanwhile, Senator Imee Marcos expressed concern late-night water rationing could extend into daytime and that drought could occur in lowland farms as dam water levels were going down faster this summer.
The water level at Angat Dam – the main source of drinking water for Metro Manila and irrigation for farmers in Pampanga and Bulacan, she said, could dip from the present 191 meters to the critical level of 180 meters before the next administration takes over.
“We have been complacent for four decades,” she said.
She noted that most of the old dams like Angat, Pantabangan, and Magat opened between 1967 and 1983 but have not been rehabilitated since then.
“Cloud-seeding and water rationing are just stopgap measures. It has not rained despite the forecast of a longer La Niña,” she added.
Amid budget constraints, Marcos said the next administration should ramp up investment in small water impounding systems that can harvest rainwater during the wet season.
“These will be earthen dams not more than 30 meters high and that can store up to 50 million cubic meters of water. Even upland farmers can benefit from them,” Marcos said.
The country harvests less than 10 percent of rainwater, most of which runs off to the sea, according to the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration.
For his part, Manansala said multiple power plants were still undergoing forced outages like the Calaca unit 2 and SLTEC unit 2.
“We have also seen plenty of them to have exceeded the ERC mandated allowable outages and they exceeded this value in the first three months of the year alone,” he said.
He said plants that had undergone recent maintenance still experienced unplanned outages just a few weeks after their scheduled maintenance “and even the newest, youngest coal-fired power plants are seen to experience recurring frequent outages.”
Pedro Maniego Jr., ICSI senior policy advisor said the COVID-19 pandemic and Ukraine invasion only worsened what was already a fragile and inflexible energy system.
“Indigenous renewable energy is vital to the economy, as is genuine competition in the power sector. Fossil fuel-dependent baseload systems are obsolete and have been replaced by residual load systems anchored on near zero marginal cost energy sources in many countries,” he said.
“Real modernization through flexible and distributed generation—powered by renewable energy—is what we need to spare us from the perennial outages and to establish long term energy security and affordable, reliable power,” Maniego said.