The ‘energy insecure’ state of Luzon grid lingers, as system operator National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) declared second wave of ‘yellow alert’ condition in the country’s biggest power grid this week.

The state of ‘yellow alert’, which entails insufficiency of power reserves, had been raised from 1:00 to 10:00pm on Thursday (July 18) due to the continuing forced outages of power plants, as well as the generation de-rating of the other facilities.

NGCP reported that available capacity in the system had been at 12,376 megawatts; while demand was at 11,794MW on Thursday.

The system operator qualified that the latest incidents which triggered the yellow alert declaration had been the unplanned outage of the 417MW San Gabriel gas plant; and the generation capacity de-rating of the Sem-Calaca coal-fired plant.

Nevertheless, it was noted that the new alert in the Luzon power supply cannot just be solely blamed on the latest plants that suffered strain in their operations, because several plants were already on stretched forced outages since the earlier months of the year.

As explained by NGCP, “a yellow alert is issued when the operating margin is insufficient to meet the transmission grid’s contingency requirement” – or that part of the reserve which is equivalent to the biggest capacity of a single generating unit in the grid.

While an instance of ‘yellow alert’ is not exactly alarming when it comes to imminent incursion of electricity service disruptions or rotational brownouts, there is a deeper signal that it has been manifesting to the industry – primarily on much-needed capacity additions.

Essentially, it is a ‘curious case’ for the power sector that the strike of ‘yellow alerts’ still persists as a scenario despite the apparent downtrend in demand because of the cooler temperatures, hence, the theory of weather-related surge in consumption will really need deeper re-assessment.

Many of the forthcoming capacity additions are from renewable energy (RE) installations, but industry players have been prodding government policymakers and regulators to also redirect their attention on the critical need for additional baseload capacities – which by now cannot be addressed by variable RE facilities without the aid of energy storage systems.

Luzon grid, in particular, cannot be left helpless in the throes of blackouts because this is the economic center of the country – and as estimated by the Department of Energy (DOE), the equivalent cost of electricity service lack redounds to a whopping P300 per kilowatt hour.