Takeaways from congressional hearings on recent power outages

PHILIPPINES - In Brief 19 Jun 2021 by Romeo Bernardo

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Ordinarily, rotational brownouts lasting a few hours are par for the course during hot summer months in the Philippines. The heat drives up usage of air conditioners at a time when power generation from hydroelectric plants falls. Puzzlingly though, outages this time around happened while the economy is struggling to gain traction amid a lingering pandemic. The supply shortage raises the question of whether post-pandemic GDP growth could rise to and be sustained at government’s medium-term target of around 7%.Listening to separate four- to six-hour long congressional hearings, we gathered that the proximate cause of the red and yellow alerts in the Luzon grid in late May to early June was the forced outage of several large power plants. According to the Energy Secretary, these plants have a combined capacity of over 2.6k megawatts (MW) which, alongside deratings and maintenance outage of other plants, resulted in energy supply in the Luzon grid dropping from a registered capacity of 17,266 MW to 10,600 MW during the critical period when demand peaked at 11,640 MW. The red and yellow alerts[1] were warnings that system reserves fell below levels necessary to maintain grid stability,[2] signaling high probability of brownouts that in fact happened. TABLE 1.Generators on outage, May 26 to June 1Source: DOE Sec. Cusi presentation, Senate Committee on Energy hearing, June 10, 2021Although it was generally acknowledged that unplanned outages were unavoidable especially in a network where 70% of the generating plants are over 15 years old and at a time when the pandemic delayed spare parts procurement and technical experts’ visits, the discussions on whether the outages could...