Power outages may last till April 21

Forced outages in power plants due to array of technical glitches may persist until April 21, the Department of Energy (DOE) said Thursday.

The 647-megawatt generating unit 1 of the 1,200MW Sual coal-fired power plant – which tripped due to “boiler circulating pump piping leak” that mainly triggered the rotational brownouts in Luzon grid last Wednesday – is anticipated to be back in the power system on April 13 (Saturday).

But the longest generation facility to be on unplanned outage will be the 150MW unit 2 of the South Luzon Power Generation Corp. (SLPGC) of the Consunji group – which will not be synchronized to the grid until April 21.

Like the Sual coal-fired power plant,

the South Luzon Thermal Energy Corp. (SLTEC) generating unit 1 of 135MW capacity is targeted to be back in the power grid on April 13, while Pagbilao unit 3 will be back in operation on April 16.

When these power facilities will be back to the grid, the DOE expects that power supply will already be back to normal. This means that the declaration of yellow alerts may already taper off unless the other plants will also encounter forced outages.

The power plants that suffered operational malfunctions had been gridlocked with technical problems ranging from boiler tube leak for SLTEC; vibration in primary air fan for SLPGC; and boiler slagging for Pagbilao-3, according to the DOE. All three coal-fired power assets are newly commissioned plants, and the gen

eration companies (GenCos) operating them are justifying that these technical hurdles are often part of the initial setbacks in power plant operations.

With these unforced outages, Senator Sherwin T. Gatchalian, Senate Committee on Energy chairman, wants to dig deeper into the causes. He also wants to find out if any of the industry players have had any attempt to “gouge” trading at the Wholesale Electricity Spot Market (WESM) for them to financially benefit from the naturally occurring consequence of price spikes.

But Gatchalian said he will defer first to the DOE before taking action. From what it appears in recent developments though, the DOE is more sympathetic to the generation companies than the Filipino consumers who will eventually bear higher costs in their electric bills because of these troubles in the electricity system.

“I call on the DOE to immediately and thoroughly investigate these outages and to put contingency measures in place to ensure that there will be no power interruptions during election day,” Gatchalian said.

He also called on the DOE “to remain vigilant for possible collusion due to thin electricity reserves in the midst of high demand.”