Fault-finding for crippling blackouts

The new year was off to a horrendous start in Panay and Guimaras islands in Western Visayas, which were hit last week by a massive three-day blackout that disrupted the lives of 4.5 million people and caused heavy economic losses of at least P1.5 billion to fast-growing Iloilo City alone.

Local government officials led by Iloilo City Mayor Jerry Treñas are justified in their outrage at the widespread power interruptions as the memory of a similar incident in April last year is still fresh on the minds of the people of Iloilo, Antique, Aklan, and Capiz provinces and Guimaras who believed in the ardent promises made then that a similar occurrence would not happen again.

Sen. Grace Poe, chair of the Senate committee on public services, shared Treñas’ outrage, pointing out that the April 2023 blackout in the island-provinces should have been an eye-opener for the National Grid Corp. of the Philippines (NGCP) and the power distribution utilities.

Unexpected tripping

“They should have been better prepared for any system disturbance and avert[ed] such with efficient planning and utilization of resources,” Poe said.

That a similar outage caused by the unexpected tripping of several power plants did happen again in less than a year in Panay Island, the country’s sixth largest island with the fourth largest population, the Department of Energy singularly blames the NGCP, the lone company that operates and maintains the nationwide grid.

An incensed Energy Secretary Raphael Lotilla claimed that the island-wide blackout from Jan. 2-5 was entirely “preventable” had the NGCP immediately undertook the necessary steps to balance supply and demand in the Panay grid and thus “prevent a sub-system-wide collapse.”

“From the time that a generator had an unscheduled breakdown past noon of Jan. 2, NGCP did not do anything as the systems operator responsible for maintaining the stability and integrity of the transmission grid,” lamented Lotilla.

Biggest monopoly

He has thus added his voice to strident calls to review NGCP’s congressional franchise and vowed to “exact full accountability” for any failure in the delivery of services of NGCP, the transmission concessionaire and the “country’s biggest monopoly.”

Lotilla stressed that the NGCP should have learned the hard lessons from the painful April 2023 episode “to take extraordinary precautions due to the fragility of the grid.”

Indeed, the NGCP promised in the aftermath of the April 2023 blackouts to complete the 230-kilovolt Cebu-Negros-Panay backbone project to strengthen the Panay grid by August 2023, but has failed to do so. It now says that the Cebu-Negros-Panay Stage 3 project would be completed by March this year to enhance grid reliability.

NGCP has already been in hot water for these delayed transmission projects since last year when the Energy Regulatory Commission called it out for failure to meet its own timelines to complete some 37 crucial but long-delayed transmission projects.

Convenient scapegoat

No wonder then that almost all stakeholders want the head of NGCP, even as it flatly refused to take all the blame and came out swinging at its detractors.

NGCP stressed that it was limited to transmission of power from producers to grid-connected areas and had nothing to do with the generating plants. If there is no power generated, then it has nothing to transmit to the grid, thus NGCP said it was “alarming to hear policymakers immediately make conclusions based on assumptions contrary to fact.

”It insisted that the transmission grid was stable prior to the still unexplained tripping of multiple power plants and firmly refuted allegations that it had failed to stabilize the transmission system in Panay.

NGCP added that instead of using NGCP as a convenient scapegoat, policymakers should be objective in their search for facts and avoid coddling “certain sectors.”

Wrath of government regulators

It was perhaps alluding to the generating companies in Panay that have so far escaped the wrath of government regulators and legislators even if they have yet to fully explain why the plants tripped in the first place aside from giving the vague “equipment breakdown” excuse.

While seeking to share the blame with the Panay companies, the NGCP should be held accountable for the failure to comply with its contractual obligations before pointing fingers at others.

Weary Filipinos can also do without the grandstanding by government officials that usually follows serious incidents such as the Panay outage to curry brownie points among their constituents.

What is more urgently needed now is for the government regulators and legislators to use much cooler heads to see through the war of words and extensively investigate the crippling blackouts in order to find relief for the public.

They should get their act together and be guided by the singular intention of finding effective and permanent solutions to prevent another expensive outage in Panay and Guimaras and in other parts of the country.