Visayas grid placed on August’s first Yellow Alert amid ongoing plant outages

CEBU CITY, Philippines — The Visayas power grid was placed under a yellow alert on Monday, August 3, its first for August, as prolonged outages at several major coal-fired power plants continued to strain the region’s supply.

The yellow alert will be in effect from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m., when available capacity is projected at 2,478 megawatts (MW) against an expected peak demand of 2,327MW.

Although supply is enough to meet demand, the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) said the remaining reserve is too thin to satisfy the grid’s contingency requirement in case a large generating unit suddenly trips offline.

READ MORE: Visayas power grid stays fragile as August begins

NGCP said the alert was driven by the continued outage of several of the Visayas’ biggest coal-fired power plants, compounded by the emergency shutdown of another coal unit in Toledo City, Cebu, on Sunday, Aug. 2.

The latest alert suggests the Visayas grid remains vulnerable despite the start of a new month, with many of the same large generating units that triggered repeated yellow and red alerts in recent months still unavailable.

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As of Monday, 1,055.8MW of generating capacity remained offline.

Furthermore, a total of 26 power plants remained on forced outage, with three units newly offline since August and another 16 operating at derated capacities, NGCP said.

A yellow alert indicates that while electricity supply remains sufficient to meet demand, the operating reserve has fallen below the required contingency level.

It is one level below a red alert, which is declared when available capacity can no longer cover both demand and the required reserve, increasing the likelihood of rotating power interruptions.

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