RDC-6 pushes Visayas power emergency as outages worsen

ILOILO CITY — The Regional Development Council of Western Visayas (RDC-6) is pushing for a state of power emergency in the Visayas as the region faces a widening electricity supply deficit and prolonged forced outages at major power plants.

The council approved a resolution ad referendum on Monday, Sept. 14, urging the Office of the President and the Department of Energy (DOE) to declare a state of power emergency covering the entire Visayas.

An ad referendum approval allows council members to adopt a measure by circulation without convening a full session.

The resolution followed RDC-6’s meeting with Energy Secretary Sharon Garin on measures to address the worsening power supply situation in Western Visayas.

“We passed an urgent referendum urging the Office of the President and the DOE to declare a state of power emergency in the Visayas. We are not only including Western Visayas but the entire Visayas because that is a common problem,” RDC-6 co-chairperson Jobert Peñaflorida, a lawyer, told Daily Guardian.

Peñaflorida said RDC-6 would also urge counterpart regional development councils in the Visayas to pass similar resolutions.

He said the emergency declaration could help local governments implement measures and expedite permits and licenses needed for the DOE’s short-term interventions, including battery energy storage systems and power barges expected to operate before the end of the year.

“By so doing, this will allow us to fast-track a lot of action plans, including permits and licenses that would address the power supply augmentation immediately,” he said.

With the passage of the resolution, RDC-6 will also conduct a study to assess the economic impact of the power interruptions.

The council also approved a separate resolution Monday urgently seeking the interconnection of the Visayas and Luzon, particularly through the proposed Mindoro-Panay transmission line.

The Mindoro-Panay 230-kilovolt Interconnection Project of the National Grid Corp. of the Philippines (NGCP) is intended to extend the western transmission corridor from Mindoro into the Visayas, following the Batangas-Mindoro 500-kV Interconnection and Backbone Project.

NGCP has placed the Mindoro-Panay project in its 2041-2050 Transmission Development Plan, making it a long-term solution to the region’s power supply constraints.

The Visayas is currently linked to Luzon only through the Leyte-Luzon high-voltage direct current line on the eastern side of the grid, which means Panay sits farthest from that entry point.

Peñaflorida said the proposed interconnection should be expedited because Luzon has sufficient generation capacity that could potentially help address the Visayas’ shortage.

“What we need for the Visayas to bridge the gap is more than 400 megawatts (MW). We will urgently ask for the interconnectivity so that we will have additional power supply,” he added.

Peñaflorida said the region’s power supply problem was anticipated because electricity demand has been increasing, although he noted that construction of new power plants and development of additional generation sources take years.

“I think we saw this coming. The problem is that the construction of power plants or the development of additional power sources is not immediate. It will take a long time, but the situation was aggravated by the fact that many of the power plants broke down at the same time,” he said.

“As a result, we in the Visayas suffer the most from power outages, especially in Western Visayas because we are at the end of the line,” he added.

On Tuesday, Sept. 15, NGCP said the Visayas grid had an available capacity of 2,352 MW against a peak demand of 2,492 MW.

The unavailable capacity from forced outages and derated plants reached 962.9 MW, according to NGCP.

The grid operator identified the unavailability of the Visayas’ large coal-fired power plants — Therma Visayas Inc. Units 1 and 2 and Palm Concepcion Power Corp. Unit 3 — as one of the factors behind the red and yellow alerts.

NGCP also cited limited power imports from the Mindanao grid as another contributing factor.

NGCP raises a yellow alert when operating reserves fall below the required contingency level and a red alert when supply is insufficient to meet demand, a condition that can trigger manual load dropping.

The Visayas grid consists of the interconnected island grids of Cebu, Negros, Panay, Leyte, Samar, and Bohol, with the region accounting for about 14% of the country’s total power demand, according to NGCP.

The continuing outages have forced distribution utilities in Western Visayas to implement rotational power interruptions when instructed by NGCP to reduce demand and protect grid stability.