NGCP: Panay Island power outage involves multiple parties

The National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) said the company should not be solely held accountable for the recent Panay power outage, as other parties in the energy sector were also involved.

In an interview with the ANC on Monday, Jan. 8, NGCP Spokesperson Cynthia Alabanza said they do not have the authority to unilaterally shut down the seven plants and highlighted their ongoing efforts to address the issue from their end.

“We’re not washing our hands off it, there are transmission-related solutions that can be and have been implemented, but it takes time,” Alabanza said. “We’re not the only ones involved in this issue.”

Alabanza also responded to the allegations in terms of what they could have done, stating “We cannot anticipate [the last two remaining power plants going off] because it’s an emergency shutdown.”

“We could have delivered [power] somewhere else, but it won’t be able to meet the need of the entire Panay island… Without the largest plants, there is nothing to be done,” NGCP spoke on their behalf.

Last week, the NGCP reported that they did not find any voltage fluctuations in the system, and have therefore followed their standard protocol as a transmission service provider.

Last Jan. 2, Alabanza said that there was only one power plant that was scheduled for a maintenance check, however, they did not expect other plants to go down as well.

The NGCP noticed that the last power plant to be resolved, which is the Palm Concepcion Power Corp. (PCPC) had an unexpected reaction to the widespread shutdown.

“Last April of 2023, PCPC changed their protection settings without informing us, which made it incompatible with the rest of the system [and] caused the Panay grid to collapse last year,” Alabanza said.

Since the beginning of the outage, Unit 1 of Panay Energy Coal Fired Power Plant [PEDC] was synched in less than 24 hours, while Unit 2 was normalized back to the grid in less than 10 hours.

However, PCPC took two and a half days later to synchronize back to the grid.

The NGCP reiterated that incidents like these are addressed properly with involved corporations and other groups in the energy sector.

“When an incident happens, our focus is on restoration, and then the post-mortem happens after,” the NGCP spokesperson explained and added that they are going to meet with PCPC to make sure the settings are readjusted to be able to coincide with the power standard.

The transmission firm also said that this kind of investigation would take at least six to eight months before they can render the full report.

Looking into suggestions of the public, Alabanza considered the proper generation planning which is aligned with NGCP’s plans as well.

“If you have four units supplying 70 percent [of power], that should be spread out more,” she read. “More smaller units avoid vulnerability.”

However, the transmission provider also said that they need a better overview of how the plants are built, how they are built, and what technology is being used.

“Interconnection helps, but you shouldn’t be able to depend on the 70 percent coming from something else because it’s too big for the Panay islands to bear.”

Panay island gets additional resources from Negros, which helped support the stabilization last week.

“Negros is also uniquely situated in almost 50 percent of supply comes from Solar, but it’s an intermittent source,” she said.

Meanwhile, House Speaker Martin Romualdez said the possible Maharlika investments to be injected in NGCP for infrastructure improvements and other necessary enhancements within the grid corp. 

Alabanza commented on this and said that funding is not the issue, as they continue to seek government support such as permitting.

“[We are] already a public-private partnership, the facilities are still government-owned,” she emphasized, but could still use the national infra project support as it helps the country’s economic development.