The National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) placed the Visayas grid on yellow alert from 3 p.m. to 8 p.m. Wednesday due to a narrow operating margin as several power plants are offline or running at reduced capacity.
The grid currently has an available capacity of 2,694 megawatts (MW) against a peak demand of 2,351 MW. NGCP explained that a yellow alert is declared when the margin between supply and peak demand is small.
Major contributors include the unavailability of Therma Visayas Inc.’s coal-fired units 1 and 2 (169 MW each) and the emergency shutdown of Leyte Geothermal Power Plant Unit 3, which derated from 79.5 MW to 39.3 MW. Overall, 898.6 MW is unavailable due to 14 plants on forced outage and another 14 at reduced capacities.
NGCP did not disclose the reasons behind the capacity drops but noted that the Luzon and Mindanao grids remain in normal condition.