Power plants back online

CEBU, Philippines - Two power plants with a combined capacity of 164 megawatts serving the Cebu-Negros-Panay grid are expected to be back online today.

One plant of the Cebu Energy Development Corp. in Toledo City and another of the Panay Energy Development Corp. have been out of the grid since May 16 and 18, respectively.

CEDC’s plant was scheduled to be back on May 22 and PEDC’s on May 25. 

The plants were shut down due to some damage.

“We expect that by tomorrow, these two will be back on the grid,” said DOE-7 regional director Antonio Labios yesterday.

The Leyte Geothermal Power Plant, with a capacity of 36MW, was already back on the grid two days ago. It shut down last May 18 due to some damage to its turbine generator.

Due to the shutdown of the power plants, the CNP grid has incurred an average deficiency of -70MW since May 16.

“Pero as of yesterday, tungod kay naayo na ang usa ka planta, ni mubo ang atong power shortage. Instead of -70MW in the past days, karon kay -40MW na lang,” Labios added.

Despite the power shortage, the Visayan Electric Company has not resorted to rotational brownouts as they adopted the Interruptible Load Program.

ILP is a program wherein VECO’s big customers can opt to use their own generators to temper power shortages within VECO’s franchise area.

“Tungod ni sa atong ILP nga nakatabang gyud og dako nganong wala gyud ta nag-brownout,” VECO spokeswoman Theresa Sederiosa said.

National Grid Corporation of the Philippines spokeswoman Betty Martinez said that they were able to get 40MW from Luzon yesterday for the CNP grid.

 The NGCP, as posted at their website at 6 a.m. yesterday, said the CNP grid or the Visayas grid has a system capacity of 1,536MW but the system peak demand reached to 1,576MW or a -40MW deficiency.

As of 4 p.m., the Visayas grid incurred a deficiency of -10MW in the morning, -40MW in the afternoon and a projected -16MW in the evening.

Labios added that so far no other power plants reported shutdown. — /BRP (FREEMAN)