MANILA – The Department of Energy (DOE) said the longer period for raising the red alert status over the Luzon grid is due to additional power plant outages.
The Luzon grid on Tuesday is under red alert from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. to 10 p.m., and yellow alert status from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m., 5 p.m. to 6 p.m., and 11 p.m. to midnight, DOE said.
The agency said the 316-megawatt GMEC Coal-Fired Power Plant Unit 2 went offline at 3:56 a.m. Tuesday due to a suspected boiler tube leak.
“The plant is expected to be back online by 8 June 2021,” it said.
This is on top of the reported power plants that were on outage Monday including the GNPower Dinginin Coal-Fired Power Plant Unit 1, San Roque Hydroelectric Power Plant, and Sual Coal-Fired Power Plant Unit 2.
From 1,285 MW forced outages on Monday, this has increased to 1,579 MW Tuesday.
The available power capacity on Tuesday also declined to 11,408 MW from the previous day’s reserve of 11,729 MW, while peak demand is slightly higher from Monday’s 11,514 MW to this day’s 11,593 MW power requirement.
“In order to maintain a balanced system, NGCP (National Grid Corporation of the Philippines) may implement manual load dropping (MLD) in parts of Luzon today to maintain the integrity of the power system,” DOE added.
In a separate advisory, NGCP listed scheduled MLD or rotational brownouts in parts of Isabela, parts of Nueva Ecija, parts of Pangasinan, parts of Bataan, parts of Batangas, parts of Camarines Sur, parts of Metro Manila, and the province of Ifugao.
Red alert is raised if the power reserves breached the maintaining level of 4 percent of the peak demand, thus rotational brownouts are experienced.
The DOE earlier forecasted that the peak demand for this year would reach 11,841 MW.
On the other hand, a yellow alert is raised when there is a thinning of power reserve in the system with demand approaching critical levels. There is still sufficient supply of power and would not cause any power interruption.
Power supply for vax storage
Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) Undersecretary Jonathan Malaya told reporters that the agency has reminded local government units (LGUs) to secure an uninterruptible power supply in cold storage facilities of coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) vaccines.
“At this time of pandemic, vaccines are more valuable than gold and therefore contingency plans should be implanted soonest to mitigate the rotational brownouts being implemented by the NGCP,” Malaya said. (With reports from Christopher Lloyd Caliwan/PNA)
