Consumers in Bohol and Cebu provinces can expect a more resilient grid after the National Grid Corporation of the Philosophers (NGCP) energized the 230-kiloVolt (kV) Cebu-Bohol Interconnection.

“The Cebu-Bohol Interconnection Project (CBIP) will play a crucial role in improving transmission services and grid stability in Central Visayas.

It will also help improve the transmission highway in Cebu, the load center of Visayas, with a new line to transmit power in and out of the province,” NGCP said on Tuesday.

The CBIP, with Line 1 energized in July and Line 2 fully energized in September with a capacity of 1,200 megawatts (MW), is a new transmission facility that involves connections in Argao, Cebu, and Maribojoc, Bohol via 54.6 circuit-kilometers of submarine cables.

It crosses the Bohol Strait, and 97.6 circuit-kilometers of transmission lines comprised of 179 overhead towers from Argao to the Dumanjug Substation in Cebu, and from Maribojoc to the Corella Substation in Bohol.

N-1 contingency

The line will help provide N-1 contingency in the province in the event of an outage of the existing Leyte-Bohol line, said the NGCP

N-1 contingency refers to the grid’s ability to withstand a major system disturbance through redundancies in the system, thus mitigating any possibility of island isolation.