MANILA, Philippines — The National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) issued red and yellow alerts for the Visayas grid on Friday, as major power plants in the island group were unavailable and imports from Mindanao were limited.
The transmission firm said that the red alert would be between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. while the yellow alert status would be between 2 p.m. and 5 p.m. and also between 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. as peak demand was expected to reach 2,348 megawatts (MW), whith available capacity at 2,360 MW.
NGCP said that 12 plants were on forced outage, 12 were running on derated capacities for a total of 1,116.1 MW unavailable to the grid.
The unavailable plants are the Therma Visayas Inc. Unit 1, Therma Visayas Inc. Unit 2, Kepco SPC Power Corporation Unit 1, Cebu Energy Development Corp. Unit 1, and TPC Coal; The extended outage of Sarangani Energy Corporation Unit 2, and planned outage of STEAG 2 prompted the need to import power from Mindanao.
A red alert status is issued when power supply is insufficient to meet consumer demand and the transmission grid’s regulating requirement.
Meanwhile, a yellow alert is issued when the operating margin is insufficient to meet the transmission grid’s contingency requirement.
