Full power relief for the grid-strapped Visayas region will take three months as several major power plants are slowly brought back online, the Department of Energy (DoE) said Wednesday.
Energy Undersecretary Mario Marasigan said the KEPCO SPC Unit 2 resumed operations Tuesday, while the Panay Energy Development Corp. Unit 3 is targeted to return 3 July.
Two more facilities, Therma Visayas Unit 2 and Unit 1, are scheduled to come back online 2 and 30 August, respectively.
Officials expect the return of the four generating units to ease severe supply constraints that have caused persistent electricity shortages across the central Philippines.
The National Grid Corporation of the Philippines reported that 10 power plants are on forced outage, including nine units that have been offline since May. An additional eight generating units have been unavailable since early 2021, and 17 plants are operating at reduced capacity.
Combined outages and limitations have wiped out 1,023.7 megawatts of generation capacity from the grid.
Grid operators attributed an extended yellow alert — issued when operating reserves fall below the safety threshold required for unexpected contingencies — to these ongoing outages and a 64-megawatt spike in projected electricity demand.
The energy department revealed that peak demand in the Visayas has surpassed 2,700 megawatts, while available supply dipped to as low as 2,244 megawatts due to the plant shutdowns.
To bridge the immediate supply gap, the Mindanao-Visayas Interconnection is operating at its maximum 450-megawatt capacity to funnel surplus electricity from Mindanao into the Visayas grid.
