The crippling blackouts that plunged Panay island into a state of distress in the initial days of the New Year has less chance of recurrence because of the completion of the 230-kilovolt (kV) Cebu-Negros-Panay (CNP) project of the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines.

That has been the assessment of Razon-led MORE Electric and Power Corporation, a power utility servicing Iloilo and will be depending largely on the broadened wheeling capacity of the transmission facility, which serves as a backbone for the power system spanning Panay island.

The CNP transmission facility comprises of three sub-phases and these are all intended to reinforce the transport of generated electricity within Panay as well as Negros and Cebu provinces.

As emphasized by MORE Power President and CEO Roel Z. Castro, "this will be a significant relief for us at MORE Power and the entire Panay Island. Although the capacity is very good, there is a substantial relief for us.”

To note, the service domain of MORE Power in Iloilo had been among those pummeled by the four-day blackouts in January; and that revealed the social as well as economic vulnerabilities of consumers in that area when the lights went out – not only were the consumers incensed while groping in the dark, but their businesses literally skidded into a screeching halt.

"For consumers, if before the energization of the CNP project there was a 50% probability of experiencing again a four-day blackout, now the probability is only 10-20%,” Castro said.

While reminiscing the horror of that dreaded incident, MORE Power weighed up the completion of the CNP project as a major breakthrough in advancing the reliability of electricity system operations through the stretch traversed by the transmission facility.

Nevertheless, Castro qualified that while a blackout scenario cannot be totally eliminated, prudent decision-making has to be made on the sphere of reserves procurement.

The blackouts for Panay, he stressed, “can still occur,” with him stating that what is worth considering for all relevant stakeholders will be the “configuration or the identification of whether ancillary services are needed on the island.”

Castro primarily cited that the dominant source of power supply in Panay are the four major coal plants, but if any of the facilities would suffer forced outage, the smaller generating assets may not be able to fully plug capacity gap when there are plants suddenly taken out from the system.

On that account then, he indicated that “it is essential to consider whether ancillary services are necessary on the Island of Panay.”

Castro explained that the ancillary services needs of a power system is akin to a spare when there is a flat tire, that “in the event of a flat tire, there's a readily available spare that can be immediately replaced. Similarly, in the power industry, when one major power plant is offline, there's another ready to replace it” – and that kind of readiness will then spare the occurrence of ravaging service interruptions.