End to Visayas power woes within sight?

CEBU CITY -- Resolution of the power shortage that had plagued the Visayas for over a year may be in sight, with Cebu Energy Development Corp.’s commission here today its first 82-megawatt (MW) coal plant. With this new capacity -- and provided all baseload plants in the Visayas continue to operate -- there should be no more power interruptions in the region, Cebu Energy vice-president Edecio C. Satina said. After 14 months of having zero reserves, the Visayas grid finally generated a thin reserve of 31 MW last Friday as SPC Power Corp. completed the preventive maintenance of the 50-MW Cebu Thermal Power Plant I, system operator National Grid Corp. of the Philippines (NGCP) said in an advisory during the weekend. With the commissioning of Cebu Energy’s plant, Mr. Satina said the Visayas grid would have "a spinning reserve," equivalent at least to the biggest capacity in the grid which would now be the 82-MW Cebu Energy plant. But based on the Grid Code, Mr. Satina said a grid should have reserves equivalent to 23% of its demand. In the Visayas, the required reserve is nearly 280 MW based on a peak demand of 1,162 MW as of February 26. NGCP’s Web site showed that the Visayas on Sunday still had precarious reserves of just 2 MW, with available capacity at 1,078 MW against a peak demand of 1,076 MW. "If we follow the Grid Code, we still don’t have enough reserves. But this is better," Mr. Satina said in an interview. The first Cebu Energy generating unit was synchronized to the grid on Feb. 14 for test commissioning. The facility, which uses 10 MW for its operations, was able to deliver up to 72 MW to the grid last week. "It will take up to 16 hours before we can deliver the full load. Our conservative estimate is that we should no longer have brown-outs as long as all generating units are on line," Mr. Satina said. More new capacities are expected this year. The second 82-MW unit of Cebu Energy will be synchronized to the grid for testing on May 1, while the third unit will be online by December. Mr. Satina said they had to move the target for the third unit since they still have to find power supply contracts for this unit, and most contracts end in December. Panay Energy Development Corp., meanwhile, targets to commission its first 82-MW coal-fired unit in October and the second in December. KEPCO-SPC Power Corp. targets to commission in October one of the two 100-MW coal plants that it is building in Naga, Cebu. Commercial operations will start in February 2011. -- Marites S. Villamor, BusinessWorld