ILOILO City – Lawmakers from Western Visayas filed a resolution urging the Congressional Committee on Energy to conduct an inquiry in aid of legislation on the region-wide unscheduled and intermittent blackouts from April 27 to 29.
In Resolution No. 993, the lawmakers stressed the urgency to find solutions to prevent the same from happening again.
“The power outages caused serious disturbance to the Ilonggo people who are essentially being robbed of their constitutional right to quality life, not to mention the negative impacts such incidents have to the economy and the resulting damage to properties,” read part of the resolution.
The Western Visayas lawmakers were Iloilo 2nd District’s Rep. Michael B. Gorriceta, Negros Occidental 3rd District’s Rep. Jose Francisco B. Benitez, Iloilo 3rd District’s Rep. Lorenz R. Defensor, Uswag Ilonggo party-list’s Rep. James “Jojo” Ang Jr., Iloilo 5th District Rep. Raul Tupas, and Iloilo City Rep. Julienne Baronda.
On April 27 the National Grid Corp. of the Philippines (NGCP) reported it “monitored a system disturbance which affected the Visayas grid and its initial findings showed that a distribution utility-owned line tripped, and caused power plants to disengage from the transmission system, and adding that an assessment of its facilities showed that its protection systems functioned as intended.”
NGCP was able to restore power after more than 10 hours.
However, at 2:56 p.m. of April 28, another system disturbance occurred which NGCP attributed to generation tripping. Power was restored after more than three hours.
On April 29, at 8:54 a.m., NGCP monitored yet another disturbance and said that multiple power plants in Panay Island disengaged from the transmission system.
MORE Electric and Power Corporation, Iloilo City’s power distributor, released a statement stating that “since last night, they have been wanting to implement a rotational scheme in their franchise areas but NGCP did not allow them due to unstable voltage that may potentially cause further trippings”.
While NGCP stated it was “coordinating with generators and distribution utilities to work on the expeditious restoration of affected NGCP lines and facilities”, it also clarified that “power supply, distribution and transmission are three different parts of the power system and that NGCP, as the transmission provider, has no stake in power supply nor distribution”.
According to the congressmen, such statement caused “more confusion and therefore, there is a need to find out what really triggered the power outage and who should be made accountable.”
“Amidst these unscheduled power outages, there has been a deluge of complaints and bashing on social media where the primary stakeholders, the Ilonggo people, have demanded explanation from authorities,” the resolution further read./PN