Efren Balaoing, Luzon regional director, said the Luzon grid has an average excess power of at least 600 up to 1,000 megawatts daily with an expected additional 600 megawatts from clean coal and renewable energy plants in different parts of Luzon.
The Luzon grid produces about 10,200 megawatts every day, which was enough to cover the daily consumption in the island of 9,200 megawatts. DOE also expect additional 550 megawatts of natural gas from First Gen in Batangas City.
Parts of Visayas and Mindanao have been plunge into a crisis because of power shortage. Experts said only one power plant was put up in the country since 2001 and existing generating plants could not cope up the demand.
Rowaldo del Mundo, associate professor of the University of the Philippines – National Engineering Center, said private distribution companies and electric cooperatives were mandated by law to secure their own sources.
“It is the obligation of the distribution utilities to contract out their projected power requirements to serve as basis for investors and financial institutions to infuse the needed capital in order to put up new power plants that will prevent the occurrence of power crisis in the different grids,” Del Mundo said.
He said Visayas suffered a power shortage in 2008 because the distribution companies waited for the crisis to happen before they decided to commission new plants.
In Luzon, Meralco, which accounts for 75 percent of the power demand in the grid, failed to secure new power supply contracts because “no new power plants were built for more than a decade now,” Del Mundo said.
“For every one percent increase in the country’s gross domestic product, there is also an increase of around one percent of the total power demand, thus, the need for the continuous building of new power plants around the archipelago to help address the additional power requirements caused by improving economic situation,” he said.
Repost from:
http://manilastandardtoday.com/2014/06/16/no-luzon-blackouts-doe
