BY GEROME DALIPE IV
ILOILO City – The Integrated Bar of the Philippines (IBP)-Iloilo and various law school deans are being considered as among the petitioners in a class suit to be filed by the Iloilo provincial and city governments against the National Grid Corp. of the Philippines (NGCP) over the three-day blackout that hit Panay Island and the rest of Western Visayas.
Mayor Jerry Treñas said he will be meeting with the IBP and law school deans in Iloilo to discuss the possibility of them joining the city and provincial governments in suing NGCP.
Treñas said that lawyers from the City Legal Office will be meeting today with the lawyers from the Provincial Legal Office to discuss the filing of the class suit against NGCP.
The mayor renewed his call to file a class suit after the NGCP issued an advisory warning the consumers to prepare for another round of power blackout on Panay Island in the next three to five days.
He said that NGCP lacked the necessary measures to ensure the safety of the transmission lines and to guarantee that Region 6 had sufficient electricity.
He maintained that Congress should continue investigating the power blackout from Jan. 2 to Jan. 5 that hit Panay Island and other parts of Region 6.
The city government pegged the losses at P1.5 billion while the provincial government lost about P3.5 billion during the three-day power outage.
MORE Electric and Power Corporation (MORE Power), the sole power distributor in Iloilo City, urged its consumers to prepare for another blackout in Panay due to “unresolved issues” in some major power plants.
MORE Power said the NGCP notified them about the power outage in the next three to five days.
“This is due to insufficient power generation supply. This is expected to last three to five days from now. We advise our consumers to be more efficient in using electricity and be prepared for possible manual load dropping affecting your area,” MORE Power said in an advisory.
The NGCP earlier blamed the power outage on Panay Energy Development Corporation (PEDC) Unit 1, which tripped at around noontime on Jan. 2 due to a boiler feed pump issue.
The Palm Concepcion Power Corporation (PCPC) Unit 1 and PEDC Unit 1 simultaneously tripped because of a grid voltage imbalance.
PEDC Unit 1 with 83 megawatts (MW) load capacity tripped at 12:06 p.m. on Jan. 2, and after two hours or at 2:19 p.m., PEDC’s Unit 2 with an 83-MW load capacity and the PCPC with 135-MW followed.
In an earlier statement, NGCP reported that with the tripping of three of the largest power-generating units and the planned maintenance shutdown of PEDC Unit 3 (150 MW), 451 MW, or 68.75% of the total 656 MW in-island generation, was lost to the Panay sub-grid.
The Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) has launched an investigation into the power outage to determine the liability of the entities that caused it. The investigation will be done in six to eight weeks./PN
