THE Department of Energy (DOE) plans to tighten the noose on the operations of power plants in the country to ensure their compliance with the grid’s protocols.
Undersecretary Josefina Patricia Asirit said DOE officials met with representatives of the National Grid Corp. of the Philippines (NGCP) to check whether power-generating companies (gencos) are strictly following the grid operation and management program (GOMP).

The GOMP outlines NGCP’s protocols on the dispatch and shutdown of power plants in the country. It calls for gencos to notify the country’s transmission line operator when their facilities go under rehabilitation or will start operating after maintenance works.

A spate of power interruptions hit the country last year, partly caused by scheduled maintenance of a number of plants.

“We noticed that gencos seldom followed it [GOMP],” Asirit said.

“There were a lot of unplanned and forced outages that affected the generating capacity,” she added.

This year, the country’s power supply would remain critical should any power plant bog down again.

Based on DOE projections, the grid would be short of 300 megawatts for its peak and reserve requirements when demand is at its highest, especially during the summer months.

But “we have sufficient generating capacity,” Asirit said.

The DOE also plans to check on gencos’ capacities, both what they nominate to the grid for dispatch and what they can actually produce, as this also was a source of discrepancy last year.

“There is a great divide, there is a wedge, and we like to find out. Even NGCP will have difficulty in monitoring this considering that the submissions that are required from the [gencos] to NGCP is based on different [numbers],” Asirit said.