Thinktank warns:
THE Yellow Alert declared by the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines in the Mindanao and Visayas grids may be a cause for concern to Mindanao power consumers.
This incident should compel the Power Sector Assets and Liabilities Management (PSALM) to fast-track the rehabilitation and uprating of the Agus-Pulangi Hydroelectric Complex (APHC) to provide stability to the Mindanao grid.
Occurrences like this is unnerving to close observers of the Mindanao power situation, said BenCyrus G. Ellorin of the Consumers for Renewable Energy Action in Mindanao (CREAM). “Are they cooking up something again,” he asked referring to the oligarchs running the power industry.
Mindanao definitely needs more power supply. And the best way forward is to rehabilitate and uprate APHC in tandem with distributed solar power systems, he added.
Although Mindanao’s power surplus, which reached around 2,000 megawatts, has been eaten up by the year-on-year increases in demand and export to the Visayas, any new power supply in Mindanao should come from renewable energy, said Ellorin.
A Mindanao-based company and state university is proposing the hybrid economic dispatch (HED) where solar farms are used to augment the production of the APHC. This system would prevent the over-exploitation of the Lake Lanao which powers the Agus power plants, consisting of six cascading hydro plants along the Agus River from Marawi City and Saguiaran town in Lanao del Sur to Baloi, Lanao del Norte down to Iligan City.
The proposal developed by the Greenergy Devt. Corp. and engineers at the University of Science and Technology of southern Philippines (USTP) would also entail the introduction of Circular Economy for Hydro Plants (CEHP), where water in the Agus River is pumped back upstream using solar-powered pumps. The proposal called Energy Storage Project is set to be submitted as an unsolicited proposal through the Public Private Partnership (PPP) office.
Although the power supply in Mindanao stabilized on August 2 with the firing back of Steag Mindanao Coal plant in Villanueva, Misamis Oriental, and unit 3 of Pulangi 4 in Maramag, Bukidnon, power supply in Visayas remained unstable that another yellow alert was hoisted in the island group last August 5 and lasted for another three days.
Meanwhile, according to the think-tank Institute for Climate and Sustainable Cities (ICSC) said “These outages are not isolated incidents.”
In an analysis of the recent Yellow Alert declaration posted in its website icsc.org, the think-tank said: “the recurring grid alert across the country is not just a temporary supply issue; it signals a deeper systemic issue: the Philippines’ over-reliance on coal, which still accounts for around 60% of the power generation mix. Addressing this challenge requires moving away from large baseload coal plants and towards a more flexible and distributed energy system.”
Mindanaoans should be woke enough to prevent repeat of history that resulted in over-dependence to expensive imported coal and diesel.
Mindanao was plunged into darkness immediately after the government privatized the power barges in Nasipit, Agusan del Norte and Maco, Davao Oriental in 2009. The privatized power barges were operated by the state-run National Power Corporation as baseload power plants, but was initially operated as ancillary power plant when it was sold to the Aboitiz conglomerate owned Therma Marine Inc.
The power crises in 2010 and 2011 were used as predicate of the coal-fired power plant construction frenzy that effectively shifted Mindanao’s dependent on renewable energy to fossil fuel in 2016. The result was over supply of around 2,000 megawatts in the grid and high-power rates as the upward cost of coal is passed on to the consumers.
A Yellow Alert is issued when the power reserves in is insufficient to meet the transmission grid’s contingency requirements. A Red Alert is a more severe warning that is issued when the power supply cannot meet the demand or when reserves are critically low. During a red alert, there is a higher risk of rotating brownouts because the grid does not have enough backup power to manage any further loss in supply.
