Napocor revises repair sked on Cebu-Leyte power cable

CEBU — The power situation in Cebu will remain critical a little longer.

This, after engineers repairing submarine cables feeding power from Leyte to Cebu miscalculated the time it would take to undertake a phase of the project.

Consequently, the National Power Corp. (Napocor) announced the other day a delay in the completion of the repair following a revision of schedules.

The Napocor, in a press statement, however, assured Cebuanos there will be no power interruptions for as long as its power plants in the Cebu-Negros-Panay grid continue to run efficiently.

The damaged 230-kilovolt submarine cables feeding power from Leyte also link that island to form the remainder of the Visayas grid.

Initially, the repair was scheduled on Sept. 5, 9, 14, 18 and 21, but Eduardo Sim, the project manager, said this had to be revised to Sept. 10, 18, 23 and 27.

Sim said the changes were due to unexpected problems encountered when the repair’s first phase was done on Sept. 5.

He said technical men from Nexan Norway, the private contractor which Napocor hired to undertake the repair, discovered that draining the oil insulation from the undersea cables actually took longer than initially estimated.

Sim said this phase of the work will now take 36 hours more than previously calculated.

Nevertheless, the Napocor official assured Cebuanos that the possibility of shortening the delay is greater than its being extended.

He also projected that by Sept. 27, the final day of the repair, a dry-run can already be made to run power through the cables.

Carmela Castillo, Napocor corporate communications officer, said that for as long as nothing in the Cebu-Negros-Panay grid breaks down, the Cebu grid’s slim reserve of 25 megawatts will suffice.

She said each Napocor power plant should have an ideal reserve of 86 megawatts but much of this reserve has been eaten up with the shutdown of power from Leyte to allow the repair on the cables to proceed.

Castillo also clarified that Napocor had nothing to do with the power interruption experienced in Cebu on Sept. 5 when the repair started. — Freeman News Service