ILOILO City – The power outage on Oct. 29 and 30 was unplanned, stressed the two big power generation firms in Panay Island, Palm Concepcion Power Corp. (PCPC) and Global Business Power (GBP).
They dismissed speculations that it was deliberate.
According to PCPC, which operates a coal-fired power plant in Concepcion, Iloilo, there was an external grid event.
“The drop in grid voltage caused by the trip of the power plant in Iloilo City resulted in an automatic trip of our plant. This is a protective system meant to prevent major damage to our facility,” said PCPC Operations and Maintenance (O&M) head, Engineer Albin Kintanar.
Their team tried to put back the plant online but the unstable grid voltage caused delays in starting the plant’s auxiliaries, ultimately affecting the start-up of the power plant unit, Kintanar further explained.
The tripping also caused critical issues in the boiler and turbine of the Concepcion power plant, he added.
The PCPC O&M team estimated at least five days to complete all the needed work to get back the plant online, said Kintanar, but they were able to finish it in three and a half days only.
“Nobody wanted this to happen. The power outage affected not only our power consumers but also us in PCPC. We want to assure all our customers that we will continue to work tirelessly to deliver our commitment of a stable power supply,” Kintanar stressed.
PCPC disconnected from the Visayas grid on Oct. 29 at 5:27 p.m. and was synchronized to the grid on Nov. 2 at 11 a.m.
On the other hand, GBP’s First Vice President for Panay Site Operations, Engineer Petronilo Madrid, explained that on Oct. 29 a technical problem caused Unit 1 of Panay Energy Development Corp.’s (PEDC) coal-fired power plant to trip off.
Following this, Madrid said, PEDC’s Unit 2 and Unit 3 were activated by around 10 p.m. on Oct. 29.
Unfortunately, Unit 3 also tripped off due to an imbalance in the boiler, said Madrid.
Adding to it was a redundancy in their desalination plant, he added.
Regarding the Oct. 30 blackout, Madrid said there was a transmission problem on the part of the National Grid Corp. of the Philippines (NGCP), thus the plant had to isolate itself and activate its protection.
“Ang mga trippings na ganyan, they happen simply because of the protection…we have three systems – generation, transmission and distribution. Any fault along the three systems may cause tripping, that is why we have this relay coordination,” said Madrid at the side lines of the Power 101 Media and Business Forum held at the GBP Institute of Energy.
This Nov. 11, Madrid said, key players in the local power sector such as GBP, PCPC, NGCP, and Panay Electric Co. will discuss the twin blackouts “to come up with better relay coordination,” said Madrid.
“It is really about the adjustment of the protection system… it’s about the fault clearing time,” said Madrid. “It is a review to improve the relay coordination among us.”/PN
