Senate presses DOE to craft brownout contingency plans

THE chairman of the Senate Energy Committee will hold regulators, especially the Department of Energy (DOE), to their promise to provide lawmakers a “comprehensive, short-term” roadmap of measures to avert a repeat of this month’s unscheduled brownouts in the next two months, when power reserves are thin.

“This coming Tuesday (June 22), we told them to submit a comprehensive, short-term contingency plan,” Senator Sherwin Gatchalian, panel chairman, said on Sunday, stressing that such no-brownouts assurance is important because of, among others, the Covid-19 vaccine rollout which is being ramped up, and the ongoing registration of voters being done by the Commission on Elections.

Having no brownouts “is ideal,” Gatchalian said in a radio interview, because that ensures “there’s no disruption” of business operations and pandemic-related campaigns, “and there’s no price hike.” He was referring to earlier projections that the unscheduled brownouts of May 31 to June 3 could impact Meralco bills, as the distribution utility was forced by the unscheduled plant shutdowns to source electricity from the spot market, where prices spiked owing to higher demand.

Gatchalian said that while he understood the basis for regulators’ insistence that the national Grid Corp. of the Philippines (NGCP) contract firm auxiliary reserves as fallback, there is need to have NGCP do this under competitive bidding, and this process might not resolve the problem of short-term outages between now and August, which power players warned against last week.

Thus, Gatchalian said, he wanted DOE to focus right away on two other options. “So I told DOE to talk to the [power] plants now,” so that either or both these options can be pursued: move the preventive maintenance shutdowns of some big plants, specifically Pagbilao and Ilijan; and advance the opening of new plants.

“We can’t force plants to defer a shutdown [if such plants are in danger of breaking down], but we know that certain maintenance shutdowns [of newer plants] can be delayed a bit,” the senator explained, partly in Filipino.

According to Gatchalian, several big power plants are expected to be rolled out, but that “red tape” is bugging them down. “I see DOE has shortcomings in terms of the delayed rollout of new plants,” so, Gatchalian said, he asked Energy Secretary Alfonso Cusi to act on the problems related to red tape, i.e., delays in processing of permits, and delays in entry of key machinery and technical people for some plants.

“Many new plants can come in, but are tied up in red tape,” Gatchalian stressed. He added that he wanted the DOE to be on top of it, and not keep tossing blame, because “the DOE is not powerless. They’re the alter ego of the President.”

Food inflation risk

MEANWHILE a lawmaker said luzon’s unstable power supply until August, if left unchecked, could drive up food prices and set back economic recovery.

Makati City Rep. luis Campos Jr. said in a statement on Sunday: “We are gravely worried that the prospect of red and yellow alerts over the luzon grid in the weeks ahead might drive up the cost of electricity and put more upward pressure on food prices.”

According to Campos, the Wholesale Electricity Spot Market (WESM) prices soared to an average of P9.29 per kilowatt hour (kwh) when the luzon grid was put on red alert from May 31 to June 2 and had two consecutive days of rotating brownouts in some areas.

“The cost of P9.29 per kwh was 171 percent higher than the average WESM price of P3.42 per kwh from January to April,” Campos said.

The lawmaker also said higher electricity rates —coupled with potential supply disruptions—could adversely affect power-intensive industries, including food manufacturing and canning as well as cooking oil processing.

The DOE, he said, “should spare no effort in averting further red and yellow alerts over the grid.”

A yellow alert means that the grid has low power supply available, while a red alert indicates inadequate supply.

Last week, the DOE called for the deferment of scheduled maintenance work on large coal power plants to avoid more outages.

As early as mid-april, Campos said NGCP had warned that Luzon could face power supply shortages until August due to baseload power plants simultaneously undergoing prolonged maintenance shutdown.

He said the power plants had previously suffered maintenance delays due to the pandemic, which restricted the movement of personnel and held up the delivery of spare parts.

Wake-up call

IN a recent hearing of the House Committee on Energy, Deputy Speaker Rufus Rodriguez said the recent power outages should serve as a wake-up call for everyone to help in averting them.

Despite the government having a Blue Print Plan for Energy until 2040, Rodriguez said the outages still happened.

“There has to be a meeting again among our stakeholders. We urge the DOE and the ERC to lessen the barriers of entry of new power plants,” he said.

Philreca Party-list Rep. Presley de Jesus said intermittent power outages have been a problem since the 1990s and should be resolved now.

The power outages would even have been worse without the pandemic because of the high energy demand, he added.

Recoboda Party-list Rep. Godofredo Guya said the rotating brownouts are driving investors away.