The "prince of darkness" is taking back the crippling journey to Luzon, as the country’s major power grid has been placed on "red alert" for the second time this week – entailing that consumers must prepare for the strike of probable rotational brownouts.

System operator National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) declared "red alert" status for Luzon grid from 3:00 to 4:00 pm, then at 8:00 to 10:00pm this Thursday, indicating then that during these periods “power supply is insufficient to meet consumer demand at the transmission grid’s regulating requirement.”

Similar to what happened on Tuesday (April) 16, any additional forced outages in power plants could descend some areas in the grid into dreaded rotational blackouts again.

Additionally, Luzon grid will have to suffer ‘yellow alert’ or tight supply and reserves insufficiency condition from 1:00-3:00pm; then 4:00 to 8:00pm and 10:00pm to 11:00pm.

Similarly for Visayas grid, it will wade through ‘yellow alert’ in its power supply by 1:00 to 9:00pm this Thursday, according to the grid operator.

NGCP qualified that 19 electric generating units are still on forced outages in the Luzon grid; while one is on de-rated (reduced) capacity, hence, drastically taking out 1,891.3 megawatts of capacity from grid supply.

As of Thursday, available capacity in the Luzon grid hovered at 13,397MW; while peak demand had been projected to reach 12,892MW.

In the Visayas grid, 13 power generating units are still on unscheduled shutdowns; while nine others have been on de-rated capacity – and that in turn had resulted in 696.7MW capacity unavailability in the grid.

The Philippine Independent Power Producers Association Inc. (PIPPA) defended that of the 19 power facilities that were down, majority are hydro plants “which outages can occur during summer when water levels are low.”

Energy Assistant Secretary Mario C. Marasigan noted that while maintenance activities are generally not permitted during the summer season, it is expected that the hydro plants would not be available because of ‘low water elevation’, especially so since the scorching weather had been aggravated by the El Niño phenomenon.

He further stated that since many of the country’s power plants are already aging, the typical ‘wear and tear’ in their equipment cannot be avoided, therefore, the forced outages could recur in the course of their operations.

“No matter how extensive the maintenance activities being done on power plants, we cannot totally prevent that they will incur ‘wear and tear’ in some components or in the equipment of the plants,” he stressed.

The energy official likened that situation to vehicles – that even if preventive maintenance activities are strictly adhered to by the owner, there are incidents that will propel them into screeching halt due to technical glitches.

Even the export of at least 450MW capacity from the Mindanao grid surplus via the Mindanao Visayas Interconnection Project (MVIP) had not been able to save both Luzon and Visayas grids from supply breaking points, with Marasigan noting that the capacity drawn from the southernmost power grid had already been gobbled up by Visayas grid, hence, Luzon was not able to benefit from it anymore.