The Department of Energy, or DoE, has prodded the National Grid Corp. of the Philippines, or NGCP, to be all hands on deck to ensure supply security and reliability of the grid to avoid power disturbances.

The department lamented on Wednesday that the recent power disturbance in the Panay grid and part of Negros could have been avoided had NGCP better performed its mandate to balance the grid.

"NGCP is in a position to anticipate system disturbance such as what happened yesterday, which unfortunately resulted in the isolation of Panay from the rest of the Visayas grid due to the simultaneous tripping of power plants that caused multiple power interruptions affecting other power plants and distribution utilities," Energy Undersecretary Rowena Cristina Guevara said.

Undersecretary Guevara added that the system disturbance that happened in April last year in the Panay and Negros sub-grids was already a lesson for all the stakeholders involved, emphasizing that what happened yesterday could have been resolved differently.

Outage hits West Visayas, too

The power disturbance has cascaded into the entire Western Visayas beginning at past noon of 2 January with the tripping of Unit 1 of Panay Energy Development Corp., or PEDC, coal-fired power plant due to boiler feed pump issue.

Subsequently, Unit 1 of Palm Concepcion Power Corp., or PCPC, and Unit 2 of PEDC simultaneously tripped due to grid voltage imbalance.

Other power plants within the Visayas grid were also affected by the Panay grid disturbances. NGCP is still analyzing the data to determine the cause and order of tripping of the six power plants.

As of Wednesday afternoon, 198.1 MW is being served by Panay power plants and augmented by 50.9 MW from other sources in the Visayas, for a total of 245 MW served.

The grid needs about 300 MW to stabilize and is awaiting the remaining plant, PCPC, to synchronize back to the grid.

The target synchronization of the plant is between 10 p.m. to 12 midnight on 4 January.