12-hour power outage in Iloilo City on Feb 9

Panay Electric Co. (PECO) said the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) will implement a 12-hour power shutdown on Sunday, Feb 9, 2020, from 6:00 am to 6:00 pm, due to maintenance work on its transformer and switchyard supplying in Iloilo City.

As a result, supply from the Panay Energy Development Corp. (PEDC) coal plant will be unavailable, PECO said in a statement.

The power distributor said it has contingency plans to ease the effect of the half-day outage.

“To hopefully avert a power interruption, we plan to run the Panay Power Corp. (PPC) diesel plant with a total net capacity of 50 megawatts for the period of the outage. We will utilize the embedded direct connection between PECO and PPC line 2 & line 4, to facilitate the supply of power. We will likewise source supply from our Palm Concepcion Power Corp (PCPC) contract and Wholesale Electricity Spot Market (WESM) through line 5 to further augment the supply needs of the city.”

But “rotating brownouts” can still occur in the city if demand exceeds available power supply.

“However, we may experience possible load-shedding if the consumption of the city exceeds the capacity of both the diesel plant and PCPC/WESM capacities. We will have to load-shed two of our feeder lines at a time with a combined capacity of 8 megawatts,” the PECO statement added.

The power firm assured that it will prioritize residential areas and will request its larger customers “to assist us by running their gen-sets to augment the power supply.”