40-MW SHORTAGE: 20,000 Iloilo customers lose power every day, MORE Power says

By Francis Allan L. Angelo

ILOILO CITY – This city loses an average of 40 megawatts of electricity each day to manual load dropping, or roughly one-third of the city’s demand, as a generation shortfall across the Visayas forces near-daily rotational outages, MORE Electric and Power Corp. said.

Engr. John Dave Jabatan, assistant manager for system planning of MORE Power, said on the utility’s public information program, MORE Power At Your Service, that around 20,000 customers are affected in a single day, with different feeders rotated through the schedule from one day to the next.

To put the figure in perspective, Jabatan said 40 megawatts is roughly equivalent to shutting down about five SM malls a day, estimating each mall at about 8 megawatts.

“And it really disrupts their quality of life,” Jabatan said, adding that a single household or business may be hit two or three times in one week.

Jabatan said he would “even call this one a power crisis,” pointing to months of manual load dropping and rising electricity rates in the Visayas.

Three power plants are currently on unplanned outage, alongside one plant on scheduled maintenance, according to Jabatan.

The largest of these are Therma Visayas 1 and 2, the two biggest coal plants in the Visayas at 169 megawatts each, or more than 330 megawatts combined, both of which have been offline since the start of the summer months.

Jabatan said reports indicated the two units encountered technical difficulties and internal problems requiring an extended repair period.

The units were earlier expected to return by the third or last week of August, but Jabatan said the restoration has slipped, citing a report by Cebu-based media that placed one unit’s return at Aug. 30 and the other at Sept. 11.

A third plant, KEPCO Unit 1, rated at more than 100 megawatts, went offline last Saturday, with its operator estimating a return by Friday.

Compounding the shortage, Jabatan said imports from Mindanao have dropped because of higher system demand there and plant outages of its own, both planned and unplanned.

The Visayas was already short even with imports from Luzon, which are limited by transmission constraints, he said.

Allocations for manual load dropping increased this week, with longer durations of red and yellow alerts, according to Jabatan.

The outages are now occurring even on Saturdays, Sundays, and rainy days, periods when offices are closed and demand is normally lower.

Jabatan stressed that the problem is a generation issue, not a distribution one, saying MORE Power can only deliver the power transmitted to it by the National Grid Corp. of the Philippines.

He said MORE Power receives no direct updates from the generation companies and relies on advisories coursed through NGCP, which in turn updates each distribution utility.

MORE Power said there is no increase on the distribution component of consumer bills, with higher charges arising from generation, transmission, and taxes.

Jabatan rejected suggestions that the utility profits from the interruptions, saying manual load dropping may be performed for only one reason.

“And that is to protect the integrity of the power grid,” he said.

Dropping load to avoid purchasing expensive power or to keep rates down is prohibited, Jabatan said.

“That is not allowed under the Philippine Grid Code,” he said, adding that a utility can be penalized for it and that “MLD is a last resort option.”

MORE Power said it is coordinating daily with the Department of Energy and NGCP, providing data on load dropping and the number of affected customers upon request.

The utility said it is seeking the intervention of the DOE and the Energy Regulatory Commission to fast-track the restoration of the offline plants.

Jabatan said normalizing the Visayas grid depends on whether the Aug. 30 and Sept. 11 targets are met, and that MORE Power is hoping the plants return earlier to ease the burden of daily outages and monthly bills on consumers.