The Department of Energy (DOE) has committed on Friday to hold the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) accountable for lapses on delivering its services, particularly on the prolonged power interruption that affected Panay Island.
The agency held a press conference on Friday, where Energy Secretary Raphael Lotilla said the incident could have been prevented had the NGCP made proactive move.
“What is most lamentable that this island-wide blackout was preventable.” he said.
“As the Independent Electricity Market Operator of the Philippines (IEMOP) has pointed out, there was a two-hour window when the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines or NGCP could have proactively called on the distribution utilities and electric cooperatives in Panay to reduce their load in order to prevent an island-wide sub-system-wide collapse,” he added.
Lotilla noted that this is the second time in less than a year that Panay Island and initially parts of Negros Occidental experienced prolonged power interruptions. The first incident was reported on April 2023 and recently followed last January 2, 2024.
“From the time that a generator had an unscheduled breakdown past noon of January 2, NGCP did not do anything as the systems operator responsible for maintaining the stability and integrity of the transmission grid for the next two hours,” Lotilla said.
“The loss of supply covering more than 15% of the power generated from Panay Island should have alerted NGCP to call for manual load reduction. The previous incident in April 2023, last year, should have served as a lesson to take extraordinary precautions due to the fragility of the grid,” he said.
Lotilla assured that the agency is committed without let-up to assist and facilitate the completion of long-delayed and new transmission projects.
“We will exert all efforts to exact full accountability for any failures in the delivery of the services expected from NGCP as the transmission concessionaire and the country’s biggest monopoly in the energy sector,” he said.
The DOE will also continue to work with NGCP to ensure the completion of project including the Panay-Negros-Cebu backbone project whose completion has been moved six times to March 2024 from the original target date of December 2020. The Mindanao-Visayas Interconnection Project whose completion has been moved to 25 January 2024 eight times from the original December 2020 date; and all other projects, including the Hermosa-San Jose transmission line in Luzon originally for completion in May 2018. PND
