DOE Targets Christmas Resolution for Persistent Grid Alerts in Visayas and Mindanao

MANILA, Philippines — The Department of Energy is targeting to resolve the persistent grid alerts in the Visayas and Mindanao before Christmas, as both regions remain at risk of blackouts amid tight power supply. “I am working on it to have them fixed before Christmas. It’s not easy, but that’s the target,” Energy Secretary Sharon Garin told reporters yesterday. The government had initially targeted to end the power issues by the end of August, but Garin admitted that electricity supply may still not normalize this month. “I think within the year, we will be able to (do it) because the (power) barges will come in. There are barges that take months to move,” the energy chief said. The National Grid Corp. of the Philippines placed both the Visayas and Mindanao grids under red alert for nine hours yesterday due to the continued shutdown of major coal-fired power plants. The red alert was in effect from 1 to 10 p.m. in the Visayas and from noon to 9 p.m. in Mindanao, triggering the implementation of manual load dropping or rotational brownouts in several areas. In the Visayas, a yellow alert was also raised from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and again from 10 to 11 p.m. Mindanao, meanwhile, was under yellow alert from 10 a.m. to noon and again from 9 to 10 p.m. At least 57 power plants were on forced outage across the two grids, while 23 others operated at reduced capacity, leaving more than 1,600 megawatts of capacity unavailable. Since the start of the year, the Visayas has recorded 93 yellow and 30 red alerts, while Mindanao has logged 10 yellow and three red alerts. With the integration of battery energy storage systems, Garin expects grid alerts to be reduced by 50 percent this month. “I’m just hoping that we can finish the battery project first, and then bring in the diesel plants as part of our solution so that we can truly eliminate the red alerts,” she said.