Luzon residents may experience brownout on Oct. 18

Power consumers in Luzon may suffer from one- to four-hour power outage come Monday. This is likely to happen if the Sual and Pagbilao coal-fired power plants fail to come online and the Magat hydroelectric power plant continues to fall short of its capacity. On Friday, Luzon residents experienced brownouts due to power generation deficiency of around 111 megawatts (MW) in the Luzon grid, according to the National Grid Corp. of the Philippines. “The deficiency is attributed to lack of supply coming in from generating plants which have either been shut down or declared reduced capacities," National Grid spokesman Cynthia Perez-Alabanza said. Sual-1 (647 MW) and Pagbilao-2 (382 MW) power plants have been on emergency shutdown while Magat power plant has reduced its declared capability from 344 MW to 85 MW, Ablanza said. The National Grid — operator of the country’s transmission highway — started on Friday at 10 a.m. its manual load dropping to direct customers and selected sectors of the Manila Electric Co.’s (Meralco) franchise area. Manual load dropping is the process of manually and deliberately removing pre-selected power loads from the grid in response to an abnormal condition in order to maintain the integrity of the system. Meralco, the country’s largest power distributor, announced that affected areas were Batangas, Bulacan, Cavite, Las Pinas, Marikina, Pampanga, Quezon, Rizal, Caloocan, Quezon City, Makati, Mandaluyong, and Metro Manila. Meanwhile, Energy Secretary Jose Rene Almendras said there would be no brownouts this weekend. Demand is expected to reach 5,975 MW on Saturday and 5,810 MW on Saturday, according to him. “There will be no brownouts on weekend. But we need to ensure that supply will be sufficient by Monday or we will still have these rotating brownouts by Monday," he said. - JE/OMG, GMANews.TV