Aboitiz Power on shutdown to improve supply in VisMin

A power plant of Aboitiz Power Corp. in Mindanao and of Energy Development Corp. (EDC) in Visayas went on maintenance shutdown to improve their reliability to supply power to the Visayas and Mindanao grids.

AboitizPower disclosed yesterday Unit 1 of the 2x150megawatt (MW) Davao coalfired power plant of its subsidiary Therma South Inc. ( TSI) started its scheduled shutdown yesterday for preventive maintenance activities.

“This maintenance activity is necessary to review Unit 1 and to implement some corrective measures as needed which should be similar in nature to the coverage of work done in the recently planned outage of Unit 2 from June 18 to July 13,” TSI president and COO Sebastian Lacson said.

The maintenance activity is estimated to last until Sept. 7.

“We are confident that after this outage, TSI should be better equipped to reliably meet the needs of our customers. As always, we will try our best to keep the duration of this interruption to a minimum,” Lacson said.

Originally scheduled to start Aug. 6, AboitizPower said the Unit 1 maintenance schedule was moved to Aug. 22 to better adjust to the grid situation.

TSI is coordinating with electric cooperatives and distribution utilities customers in Mindanao in order to implement measures to mitigate the impact of the maintenance activity.

In another disclosure, EDC said its 77-MW Malitbog Unit 2 Power Plant in Leyte tripped last Aug. 17 after it “experienced a flashover inside the high voltage terminal box.”

The plant tripping did not cause any supply shortfall in Visayas since the facility was offline and was in the process of testing and commissioning of its Automatic Voltage Regulator (AVR) under the supervision of ABB, the manufacturer of the AVR, as part of a 30 day scheduled maintenance outage.

“The incident did not have any impact on the grid as Malitbog Unit 2 was not synchronized to the grid at that time, and no injuries were sustained by any of the personnel involved,” it said.

Together with ABB and other consultants and contractors, EDC said it is currently conducting an assessment of the extent of the repairs needed and a full review to determine all contributing factors that led to the plant incident to ensure appropriate measures are taken to enable the safe and reliable operation of the unit.