‘NGCP must not be blamed for outages’

MANILA, Philippines — The National Grid Corp. of the Philippines should not be held accountable for power interruptions as the NGCP did its mandate of reporting power supply shortages, according to a House official.

“The transmission lines were restored, the reporting requirements were complied with and the grid remained stable. The bigger issue that remains before us is the adequacy of power supply,” Cagayan de Oro second district Rep. Rufus Rodriguez said.

Rodriguez made the remark during an inquiry conducted by the House committee on energy into the power disturbance that occurred on May 13, which affected 500-kiloVolt (kV) lines, but was restored on the same day.

He said that supply adequacy, not transmission remains the major challenge confronting the power sector.

“Until now there is a yellow alert in the Visayas precisely because many power plants are out,” he said, noting that generation deficiencies continue to affect grid operations long after the transmission facilities were restored.

Rodriguez questioned attempts to blame the extended red alerts solely on the transmission disturbance.

His observations were backed by statements of officials of the Department of Energy and representatives of the NGCP.

Energy Undersecretary Mario Marasigan agreed that the subsequent outages of several generating units were separate events, and were not caused by the tripping of transmission lines.

NGCP spokesperson Cynthia Alabanza said that while the company does not deny that two 500-kV transmission lines went offline on May 13, both incidents were cleared and restored within the required time frames.

Alabanza said that power generating plants are required to comply with operational and technical timelines to synchronize back to the grid.

However, despite the availability of transmission facilities, several power generating units were unable to immediately return to service.

“While we do not deny the line trippings, the prolonged red alerts cannot be attributed to the transmission lines alone. Additional generating units went on shutdown even after the transmission lines had already been restored,” Alabanza said.

NGCP earlier reported that on May 13, several power generating units became unavailable, removing approximately 450 megawatts from the Luzon grid.