VECO: Be patient as rotational brownout continues

CEBU CITY—The power distributor in Metro Cebu has asked the public to be patient and understanding in the wake of the rotational brownouts due to a low power supply in the Visayas Grid.

Given the current power situation, Anton Mari Perdices, Visayan Electric Company (Veco)  chief operating officer, said the rotational brownouts in Metro Cebu will drag on until power supply becomes stable.

“Since we are all sharing the burden, we are going to make it one hour, at most one and a half, but that is rare,” he said in a press conference on Tuesday, referring to the rotational power interruptions Veco has been implementing since Friday.

As to how long this will have to go on, Perdices said they cannot tell since it is the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) that dictate load curtailment of utilities.

The Veco, the second largest power utility in the country next to the Manila Electric Company, serves the cities of Cebu, Mandaue, Talisay and Naga, and the towns of Liloan, Consolacion, Minglanilla, and San Fernando.

On Tuesday, Veco posted on its Facebook page a list of possible feeders, along with areas connected to these feeders, that may be affected once the NGCP tells the utility to drop its load.

“What happened on Monday was there was such a drop in the supply that we had to reset and start from the beginning,” Perdices said, referring to the cycle of feeders that needed to be shut off.

“There were some areas that had two power outages during the day, but those two were one hour each,” he added.

Most of Cebu’s power, which Veco distributes to homes and business establishments, comes geothermal plants in Leyte.

The 6.9-magnitude earthquake that struck parts of the Visayas on July 6 damaged the geothermal power plants in Leyte owned by the Energy Development Corporation (EDC) in Barangay Tongonan, Ormoc City in Leyte.

The EDC has committed to complete repairs on the plants within 10 days from the earthquake.

As per NGCP, all power plants in Leyte with a total generation capacity of more than 500 Megawatts are down. Of this, 57 MW are contracted to Veco.

The NGCP line that connects the Luzon Grid to the Visayas Grid was also affected by the quake, preventing 50 MW of power from a Batangas-based coal plant to travel to Veco’s substations for distribution.

Kepco-SPC based in Naga City, southern Cebu where Veco gets 100 MW of power, is also undergoing preventive maintenance scheduled even before the earthquake last week.

The distribution utility has asked the power plant, through NGCP, to fast track the resumption of its operations as the initial target date of reenergization was still on July 20.