‘Genset option’ revived for El Niño scare

The “generating set” option will be revived primarily for the Mindanao grid. This time, it is courtesy of the scare over the El Niño phenomenon which might again strain some part of the country’s power supply.

This was according to Energy Secretary officer-in-charge Zenaida Y. Monsada, stressing that some electric cooperatives (EC) in Mindanao are being dangled with that alternative to augment their power supply at the strike of such extreme weather episode.

“We are looking at the supplydemand data of each EC – and what do they have as option… if they can qualify for gensets – especially if that is the only option to address the El Niño,” she said.

Monsada noted that it would be some sort of stretched dry months from last quarter of 2015 until summer of next year – since after the end of El Niño during the first quarter, summer season will immediately follow.

The genset option was first explored for 2015 summer months for Luzon grid because of the Malampaya maintenance shutdown then.

It was later on shelved because of the 6 billion to 12-billion exorbitant cost that was crunched by the DOE just for the country to bite into that recourse.

Monsada emphasized that roughly 400 megawatts of new capacity had been penciled in to be coming for Mindanao grid until the first quarter of 2016.

The energy chief reiterated that “at least three power plants coming in up to February and end of first quarter 2016 – one plant is coming on-line this year and then two by early part of next year, January and February. That will be up to 400MW of new capacity.”

Nevertheless, she qualified that since these plants are still relatively on their commissioning phases, the stability and reliability of supply they can inject to the grid might still be a concern.

“Our only wish here is for the forced outages in the plants to be minimized and the commissioning of the plants will go on smoothly,” Monsada said.

All of these factors, she added, are being studied carefully by the energy department and the inter-agency task force as well as the “power task force” that had been aiding them in scouring power supply solutions for the El Niño as well as the 2016 election period.

“For the power sector, we have our own task force that we organized comprising mostly of the industry players as members – the GenCos (generation companies) and distribution utilities,” she relayed further.