The Philippines’ main grids have been placed under red-yellow alert

By means of Ashley Erika O Jose, News reporter

The Philippines’ main grids experienced power supply shortages for the seventh time this month on Wednesday, with Mindanao’s power grid being declared a yellow alert for the first time in 2024.

In a statement, the National Grid Corp. of the Philippines (NGCP) Mindanao from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. under yellow alert status after nine factories in the region went offline while five operated at reduced capacity. This resulted in the unavailability of 673.98 megawatts (MW) for the grid.

NGCP said this is the first time Mindanao has been placed under yellow alert status so far this year as the region typically experiences a power surplus. The yellow alert status in Mindanao was lifted at 3:09 p.m

Yellow warnings are issued when the supply available to the electricity grid falls below a certain safety threshold. If the balance between supply and demand deteriorates further, a red alarm is issued.

The power grids of Luzon and Visayas were again placed under red and yellow alert status on Wednesday, the grid operator said.

The red alert status was raised through the Luzon grid from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m., while the yellow alert was issued from 4 p.m. to 10 p.m., NGCP said, adding that power demand in Luzon reached 14,016 MW against the available capacity of 14,249 MW.

Data from NGCP shows that Luzon reached a peak demand of 14,016 MW on Wednesday, the highest so far for the year. The previous high was measured on Tuesday at 13,864 MW.

Four power plants in Luzon have gone offline, while two are operating at reduced capacity, leaving a total of 1,840.3 MW unavailable to the grid.

As of 4:05 p.m., the NGCP lifted the red alert over Luzon, but the power grid was still under yellow alert status from 4:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m.

Meanwhile, Manila Electric Co. said. (Meralco) that it had advised participants in the Interruptible Load Program to remain on standby. These are large power consumers who have their own generation installations. These entities stop drawing power from the grid during times of unreliable supply, reducing the overall load on the grid.

“If necessary, we are prepared to implement manual load shedding as part of our responsibility to manage the system,” Meralco said in a statement provided by Viber.

The Visayas grid was placed on red alert status from 12:00 PM to 5:00 PM and from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM, while the yellow alert status was issued from 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM, from 5:00 PM to 6:00 PM and from 8:00 PM to 9:00 PM.

Three power plants in the Visayas grid were forcibly shut down, while eight plants were operating at reduced capacity for a total of 621.6 MW capacities not available to the grid.

“The reduced capacity that Mindanao exported to Visayas also worsened the power situation in Visayas,” NGCP said.

NGCP said it had implemented manual load shedding or rotating brownout in Abra province, parts of Tuguegarao City, Cagayan, parts of Albay and parts of Bataan and Batangas from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m.

“In the ICSC (Institute for Climate and Sustainable Cities) study, we assumed a 100 MW forced outage allowance for Mindanao, which is a conservative assumption based on Mindanao’s average historical outage. However, in actual network operations (Wednesday), we see that the capabilities under forced outages and reduced operations have exceeded this assumption,” Jephraim C. Manansala, chief data scientist at the ICSC, said in a Viber message.

Mr Manansala said hydropower plants are expected to have lower output during the summer months, mainly due to the El Niño weather phenomenon.

“However, the untimely unavailability and decline of other power plants such as coal have made the situation alarming,” he said.

ICSC said the country is expected to experience power supply shortages “indefinitely” as long as power plants continue to operate at reduced capacity.