The Department of Energy (DOE) is recommending the establishment of a ‘new protocol’ that shall firmly guide National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) on power supply-demand balance at the course of its grid operations during emergency situations.

As stated by Energy Undersecretary Rowena Cristina Guevara in a Senate hearing, “for protocol on supply-demand balance that will trigger emergency procedures, we will meet with NGCP next week to figure that out.”

She noted that with the punishing four-day blackout suffered by consumers in the Panay island from January 2-5, it was assessed by the energy department that one of the naturally-occurring consequence of that is realization on a need for new protocol that NGCP can employ during emergency situations.

Guevara qualified that defining protocols or parameters shall not happen on hindsight – or when unwarranted events in the power system already happened, instead, the protocols shall already be in place before any of these incidents would occur.

“For example, if one plant suddenly goes on outage, that’s the only time that we’re still defining if that is emergency or normal condition, that shouldn’t be the case. We will sit down as engineers and we will determine what are the protocols to be followed,” Guevara stressed.

At this stage, the DOE officials cannot guarantee that the distressing Panay blackouts won’t happen again – especially if the Cebu-Negros-Panay (CNP) interconnection project of NGCP would be continuously delayed.

NGCP told lawmakers that it will take roughly 450 days to complete the construction of a substation that will be tied to the CNP transmission link-up project, but that component of the facility cannot start until right-of-way (ROW) issues with some landowners are resolved.

But while these concerns are being sorted, the DOE indicated that ‘preventive measures’ are already explored and will be enforced to prevent unwanted recurrence of power service interruptions – primarily in the Panay island.

The energy official said the DOE is already talking to the power generators “to re-schedule their maintenance period,” as needed; to prevent a repeat of the January 2 blackouts.

On top of that, Guevara emphasized that the DOE “is looking at allotting a ‘headroom’ – so instead of the plants operating at 100%, they can operate at 80-90%, so that if there are other plants that will trip, there would still be headroom for the plants to ramp up their generation capacities.”