Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, January 5) — The National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) on Friday addressed accusations that its lack of action led to the massive power outage that hit Panay Island this week.
“What happened on Jan. 2 was more than a hiccup. Panay Island relies on only four power plants for almost 70% of their power and at the time this happened two of those power plants were already offline, so they had lost more than 200 megawatts of power when the rest of the power plants began tripping,” NGCP spokesperson Cynthia Alabanza told CNN Philippines’ New Day.
She added that they have yet to receive a formal report on the multiple power plant tripping.
Department of Energy Secretary Raphael Lotilla on Thursday blamed the NGCP, saying it had a window of opportunity to do something and intervene to prevent the massive blackout.
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Alabanza said they could have implemented load dropping, but it should be supported by data. “There were no indications at that time that the system would be imbalanced because voltage and frequency were stable,” she noted.
\”Had we done that and it was unwarranted, we would have had to answer why we were disconnecting customers from the system when everything seemed normal,\” she added. \”This was clearly generation driven because had there been a lot of power flowing through the system in Panay then this would not have happened.\”
Alabanza said a similar incident happened in April last year, but there was no impact since there was enough power supply flowing to the grid.
She said NGCP is ready to face any investigation as some lawmakers plan to file separate resolutions seeking a probe into the issue.
Alabanza, meanwhile, called for a \”whole of industry approach\” to prevent similar incidents in the future. She said authorities should look not only at transmission, but also the generation and distribution sectors to come up with solutions.
\”We are still hoping that the policymakers will be looking at all these sectors, especially the generation side, whether the generation mix, whether the locations of the power plants are really optimal so that these situations won’t happen again,\” she said.
The latest NGCP advisory showed that nine power plants are operational, supplying 237.3 megawatts (MW), augmented by 21.9 MW from other sources. The 135-MW Palm Concepcion Power Corporation has also synchronized back to the grid at 1:33 a.m.
