There are no indications that rotational power outages can be expected in the next few days following the placing of the Luzon Grid under “Red Alert,” which triggered rotating power interruptions in several areas.
National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) CEO Anthony Almeda made the comment during a Senate Committee on Energy hearing.
Almeda added that the Luzon grid is currently “running normal,” GMA News reported.
Senate Energy panel chair Senator Raffy Tulfo in the said hearing asked if the consuming public can expect outages in the next few days. Almeda said that the Red Alert status experienced on September 12 “are normal disturbances.”
Senate Majority Leader Joel Villanueva said the government should look into the cause of the simultaneous, forced, and unplanned outages of several power plants in the Luzon Grid.
He said this led to the “Red Alert” in power supply and the rotating brownouts. He also lamented that this happened despite the assurance from the Department of Energy. He added that the Executive branch can initiate short-term adjustments to prevent similar shortages from happening in the next year or so.
Sen. Sonny Angara cited the need to incentivize and hasten the building of new power plants, while Sen. Win Gatchalian recalled that the DOE under the past administration gave eight solutions to address “Red Alert” or brownouts.
The Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) meanwhile said it will look into the power plant
outages and transmission line tripping incident, resulting in the Luzon grid’s red and yellow alerts on Monday.
The ERC said in a statement it would verify all the reports submitted by the NGCP and the generating companies, including actions done to get it back online.
NGCP declared the Luzon grid under red alert status from 2 pm to 4 pm, and yellow alert from 10 am to 1 pm and 5 pm to 7 pm on September 12.
ERC said NGCP reported that the red and yellow alerts were “due to major generation inadequacy.”
The report said seven generating units with a total capacity of 3,401 megawatts were on unplanned outage, and three generating units had a total deration of 226 MW. Derated power plants are not operating at full capacity.
Based on the report, Calaca 2 (300 MW) was on unplanned outage due to generation high vibration refinement activities, Dinginin 1 (668 MW) was offline due to turbine vibration rectification, while Quezon Power (460 MW) was also offline due to “primary air fan A broken inlet
vane linkage.”
The report said Sual 1 and 2 (647 MW x 2) shut down due to an “external fault” after the Bolo-Nagsaag 500 kV line of NGCP tripped, which caused the system under frequency.
The Masinloc 2 (344 MW) and Masinloc 3 (335 MW) were also affected by the double outage of the Bolo-Nagsaag 500 kV line 1 and line 2.
ERC said four of the seven generating units reported that the outages were due to the tripping of the line on September 11.
On the other hand, three generating units were already on outage before the occurrence of the grid tripping incident.
ERC said three generating units were derated, namely Masinloc 1 (190 MW), due to undisclosed reasons.
GMEC 2 (31 MW) was derated due to “induced draft fan condition reaching a thermal overload,” while SLTEC 2 (5 MW) suffered decreased load due to unstable main steam pressure caused by poor coal quality.
ERC said 58 percent of the capacity on outage was due to the line tripping incident, and it will look into the cause of the tripping and actions taken by NGCP to repair the line.
The regulator will also look at why generating units could not get back online with the restoration of the transmission line.