SouthCot, Sarangani suffer 4-hour brownouts

The daily rotating brownouts in General Santos City and in nearby South Cotabato and Sarangani province have stretched to four hours as Mindanao’s power deficit plunged anew into critical levels in the last several days due to the reduced generation capacity of the National Power Corporation’s (NPC) hydroelectric plants.
Joy Celeste Alora, information officer of the South Cotabato II Electric Cooperative (Socoteco II), said Wednesday they were forced to increase the area’s daily outages by another hour from the previous average of three hours to cope with the drastic power supply cuts imposed by the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) in the last two days.
She said an advisory released by the NGCP to the electric cooperative cited that the load cuts were mainly due to the significant drop in the generation capacity of the hydroelectric plants that was attributed to the declining water levels at the Pulangi and Agus dams in Bukidnon and Lanao provinces, respectively.
In its website, the NGCP said Mindanao grid’s system capacity as of Wednesday morning only reaches 915 megawatts (MW) or 253 MW short of the area’s system peak of 1,168 MW.
“Our (power) deficit has so far increased to around 40 to 45 MW because of this situation,” Alora said in a radio interview. Socoteco II’s franchise area covers this city, the seven municipalities of Sarangani Province and the municipalities of Tupi and Polomolok in South Cotabato.
The electric cooperative has been implementing almost daily rotating brownouts in the area since January last year that range from one to three hours.
As of this month, Alora said the area’s daily power demand currently peaks at 120 MW, increasing by 10 to 15 MW since last year.
But she said the combined power supply delivered by the NPC and the Aboitiz-owned Therma Marine Inc. to the area recently dropped to around 70 to 75 MW because of the NGCP’s load-shedding scheme.
From the previous average of 70 to 75 MW, Socoteco II’s supply contract with the NPC for this month went down to just 40 to 45 MW. Therma Marine, which has a running power sales agreement with Socoteco II, augments the area’s requirements by 30 MW.
Alora said the electric cooperative is currently maximizing the distribution of the available power supplies to the area’s six feeder groups. [Allen V. Estabillo / MindaNews]