Transco expects power crisis to hit the region

A power crisis may hit Central Visayas within the next few years, said the National Transmission Commission recently.

Its basis: The surge of economic activity in the region resulted to a seven-percent increase in power demand annually but the downside of it is that power stable remains unstable to keep up with such. Transco said the Cebu-Negros-Panay grid posted a peak demand of 700 megawatts last year but recently it reached to 750-mW already.

Cebu has a supply capacity of only 320-mW but it accounts for three-fourths of the demand of 442-mW. The Leyte geothermal plants supply the shortfall through the existing 200-mW Leyte-Cebu interconnection submarine cables.

Negros Island's present supply of 175-mW has been barely enough also to meet its power demand while, in Panay Island, power supply is only half of its 120-mW demand. The power shortfall in these islands is partly remedied by two power barges and excess power from Cebu through Transco's submarine cables.

But power reserves plunged further whenever the gas turbine plants in Naga are put on economic shutdown, and other bigger power plants are placed on unscheduled maintenance shutdown, Transco said. Because of this, the electric utilities and cooperatives in these areas resorted to a manual load-dropping scheme, or scheduled rotating brownouts, to balance the supply-demand equation.

To address the problem, Transco is fast-tracking the implementation of the P3-billion Leyte-Cebu interconnection uprating project, expected for completion this coming October. This project is expected to double the carrying capacity of Transco's existing submarine cables, from 200-mS to 400m-MW, and increase the margin of power reserves in CNP grid.

Transco president Allan Ortiz said that, as of July 11, all erection works and equipment installation for the Leyte-Cebu project were already completed. "The laying of submarine cables and fiber optic cables only took three weeks and was finished two months ago. We are very optimistic," Ortiz said. - Wenna A. Berondo