GENERAL SANTOS CITY (MindaNews/14 May) – The power outages here and nearby Sarangani and South Cotabato provinces have eased off in the last several days as the National Power Corporation’s (Napocor) power supplies to the critical Mindanao grid continue to stabilize.
Joy Celeste Alora, information officer of the South Cotabato II Electric Cooperative (Socoteco II), said Monday the daily rotating brownouts in the area have gone down to “minimal level” since the middle of last week after Napocor increased the cooperative’s power allocation by 25 megawatts (MW).
“They increased our supply contract to 79 MW when Pulangi IV (hydroelectric plant) was restored to the Mindanao grid. We still have power curtailments but they’re very minimal,” she told MindaNews.
Some areas in the city experienced brownouts lasting 30 minutes to an hour during the period, which Alora said were mainly due to line trouble repairs and its de-loading scheme.
Napocor reduced Socoteco II’s monthly supply contract to 54 MW for the month of April and further slashed it to 45 MW when it shut down the Pulangi plant in Bukidnon last April 17 to undergo repair and rehabilitation.
The repair works on the 255-MW Pulangi IV hydroelectric plant was completed last May 8, or nine days ahead of its original target. During the Pulangi plant’s closure, Socoteco II received an augmentation of 35 MW from the Aboitiz-owned Therma Marine, Inc. but it remained short of 25 MW based on its peak requirement of 105 MW.
This prompted the electric cooperative to implement daily rotating brownouts in four phases lasting about four hours each, or a total of 16 hours for the areas served by its 44 feeder stations.
Socoteco II serves this city, the entire Sarangani province and the municipalities of Tupi and Polomolok in South Cotabato.
For this week, Alora said they have not yet issued any advisory or schedule for the rotating brownouts but noted that local consumers should expect some curtailments since Mindanao’s overall power situation has remained “under red alert” based on the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines’ (NGCP) advisory to power cooperatives.
As of Monday morning, NGCP said Mindanao’s power capacity stands at 1,174 MW or still 74 MW short of its 1,245-MW peak power demand.
But Alora said the current power deficit is much lower now when compared to the shortage on Monday last week that reached 350 MW based on the NGCP’s advisory.
“We hope that the situation will further improve in the coming days so we can also cut down on our use of the backup power from Aboitiz (TMI),” she said.
Alora said the power augmentation from TMI is mainly drawn from diesel-fired power barges, which are more costly to operate when compared to the hydroelectric plants.
From the P6.5618 per kilowatt-hour (kwh) in March, she said Socoteco II raised its minimum rate for residential consumers to P6.9027 per kwh for April due to the increased utilization of TMI’s backup power.
But for this month, she said they expect the charges to go down by about 70 centavos because of the increased power allocation from NAPOCOR. (Allen V. Estabillo / MindaNews)