Kidapawan residents lament daily brownouts

KIDAPAWAN CITY – Residents of this city yesterday complained that they have the “worse power outages of from two to five hours daily,” following the reported complaints of the 30 to 60-minute daily brownouts in Davao City.

“If Davaeños are agonizing over the increase of their daily brownout from 30 minutes to two hours, we must sound off our worse situation,” said Jimmy Ramos, a senior college student whose research job requires the heavy use of the Internet.

Meanwhile, a restaurant operator also lamented that since five days ago, brownouts ranged from two hours to five hours. The worst occurred last Monday when brownouts peaked to more than five hours in two unexpected schedules – one during the day and the other in the evening, he said.

What angered power consumers here more is the fact that this city is host to the Mt. Apo geothermal plant, whose energy supply has been benefitting other areas in Mindanao, an elected city official said.

The Cotabato Electric Cooperative (Cotelco) announced earlier a two-hour rotational brownout due to the power curtailment imposed by the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP).

Cotelco technical officials apologized for the additional three hours in the scheduled brownout.

According to private power distributors, one reason for the curtailment is the maintenance and repair of a power unit of Steag’s coal-fired power plant in Misamis Oriental scheduled from July 18 to Aug. 16.

Another, they said, is that the Pulangi hydropower plant lowered its production due to low water inflow and reduced capacity of the existing diesel-fired power plants in the region. But residents here complained of heavy rains in the last five days.

Still another cause, they added, is the current preventive maintenance servicing of the Mt. Apo geothermal power plant that would last until July 27.

In Lanao del Sur and Maguindanao, meanwhile, residents yesterday said brownouts are no longer surprising because "power fluctuations and outages have long become part of our lives" for years.

The local government unit of Buluan, the new capital town of Maguindanao serviced by two electric coops, has been receiving deficient power for years, prompting it to purchase a fleet of fuel-fired generators.