GenCos seek ‘compensation’ on brownout-induced economic losses

Power generation companies (GenCos)afflicted by the November 15, 2016 rolling brownouts have been seeking compensation on the economic losses they incurred as a result of the incident, according to Energy Secretary Alfonso G. Cusi.

“We reported that to the ERC (Energy Regulatory Commission) because there’s a problem – some generation companies said they sustained certain losses, so the concern is how to compensate them,” the energy chief said.

The referral to the industry regulator, Cusi qualified, shall also be in line with establishing a policy tool how to address similar concerns in case such unfortunate events would recur.

The generation companies affected by the cascade of power plant shutdowns due to a “line fault” at the transmission network include the gas plants of First Gen Corporation; the coal-fired plants of Quezon Power Philippines Ltd. Co. and GNPower; the Limay thermal plant of Millennium Energy; and the BaconManito geothermal facility of the Energy Development Corporation.

Relevant power industry players are also propounding that the circumstances of the November 15 power interruptions be noted by the ERC in its assessment of the next performance-based rate setting (PBR) filing of the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines. The regulatory body is still reviewing the next reset of the PBR that covers regulated utilities including NGCP and the distribution utilities.

An explosion at a capacitor equipment of the San Jose substation of the grid operator had been directly pointed to as the cause of last month’s massive power interruptions in the Luzon grid, based on the final report of the investigation body deployed by the Department of Energy.

Nevertheless, NGCP Spokesperson Cynthia Perez-Alabanza noted that while the incident started at their facility, there are factors claimed by the system operator as trigger to the brownouts.

Alabanza cited the sudden shut-off of the sensitive loads of Manila Electric Company (Meralco) causing “stress” in system frequency and the protection settings of the First Gen plants allegedly “not synchronized” with that of NGCP.

Meralco said “we understand that the findings of the investigating committee pointed to an equipment in NGCP’s substation that was supposed to isolate the fault, was actually the one that caused the outage.”

Relative to such developments, Cusi reiterated his call on NGCP to re-assess its installed power circuit breakers (PCBs) to ensure that these are up-to-specifications. The mandate is to undertake massive audit for its operations across Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao grids.

NGCP has also been directed “to review its system protection settings in coordination with the power plants to synchronize the plant protection settings.”

“All generating units shall remain in synchronism with the grid for at least five seconds in case the power system frequency momentarily rises 62.4Hz (hertz) or falls to 57.6Hz as indicated in the PGC (Philippine Grid Code),” a report of the probe body has stipulated.