The Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) called for a review on the recent power plant outages caused by thin power reserves, particularly in Luzon.
“[In the] speech [of] Mitsubishi, they supply 50 plants. We are interested to get hold of that list because that could be part of the data we are trying to combine. I don’t know yet who will conduct the study but somebody should come up with study on the outages,” ERC Chairman Agnes VST Devanadera was quoted as saying in a BusinessMirror report.
The ERC had conducted initial interviews and found out that even power plants aged zero to five years have broken down.
“[There are already plants that suffered] outage, and it is not planned outage. We want to know why. It’s really ironic. But then, [Energy] Secretary [Alfonso] Cusi said [the] yellow alert [is not alarming,” Devanadera stated in the report
The Luzon grid was placed on yellow alert twice this week because several power plants were not able to deliver their expected power generating capacity.
The ERC also disclosed that from 2015 up to the first half of 2019, oil-fired thermal power plants had the most number of outage days per year at 84.5, 50.4 of which were unplanned. Diesel-fired power plants, on the other hand, had the least number of outage days at 15.8. Pulverized coal power plants account for 50.1 outage days with more than half of 28 were unplanned. Circulating fluidized bed coal power plants, on the other hand, recorded 40.8, 24.3 of which were unplanned.