THE yellow alert status for the Visayas grid, earlier announced to last between 6:00 p.m. to 7:00 pm. on Friday has been lifted.
This was caused by the forced outage of generating units of two major coal-fired power plants, which was the reason for the yellow alert status.
The National Grid Corp. of the Philippines (NGCP), in an advisory, said the alert status was lifted at 1:00 p.m.
This, as the expected peak demand has declined to around 2,170 megawatts (MW) from 2,453 MW earlier.
Latest figure on available capacity is around 2,522MW, slightly lower than the 2,682MW earlier.
A yellow alert status is issued when available capacity is not enough to meet the grid’s contingency requirement.
The yellow alert status earlier issued by the NGCP was made after it noted that units 1 and 2 of the Therma Visayas Inc. remain unavailable, and unit 1 of the 82-megawatt Cebu Energy Development Corp. is on forced outage due to grid operating and maintenance program (GOMP).
GOMP is an unplanned outage that occurs outside of the maintenance schedule approved by the Department of Energy.
These unavailable generating units, along with the underrated capacities of 20 other power plants and the forced outages of around 20 others, resulted in a decline of around 763.5 MW for the grid, according to the NGCP.
It is also a matter of bad timing as these outages coincided with the forced outages of other smaller power plants such as hydro power plants that normally undergo regular maintenance during summer months to take advantage of the lower water levels in dams. PNA
