Rotating power outages likely in parts of Luzon for 2nd day, red alert hours longer

Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, June 1) — Parts of Luzon may experience power interruptions for the second day in a row Tuesday, with the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) announcing longer red alert hours.

In its Facebook page, the NGCP announced red alert hours of 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. to 10 p.m., longer than the 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. period yesterday. A red alert means power supply is insufficient to meet the projected demand for energy.

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This is not a one-off thing. This has been going on and on for years. We journalists have been sounding the alarm for a looooooong time. As I said in one social media post:

Developing a base load power plant takes years, at least 5 years. Securing approval for new power plant projects from the Energy Regulatory Commission takes a long time. The ultra super critical 600×2 MW coal plant Atimonan One by Merlaco PowerGen is still under development (for those in Luzon). Meanwhile, there are already a lot of renewable energy power plants here but that cannot substitute for base load power plants. It’s complicated to explain how to dispatch RE power and base load (coal, diesel) since it’s technically with the national grid. As Metro Pacific President Joey Lim said, our grid is not a complete loop. If one power plant trips, the grid cannot just simply dispatch electricity from another area/plant; basically he likened it to a one-way highway. Moreover the dispatch of solar and wind power have specific times since power from them are not available at all hours.

We were not remiss in giving the public the FYI, right? Hahahaha! This is why I have 2 rechargeable standfans, my salary from my part-time teaching in CMC for 1 semester was used to buy a gasoline genset, my “desktop” at home is a gaming laptop so when power goes out, the fun still continues. Everything that can be purchased as rechargeable, I purchased. I still don’t have a house of my own but when the time comes I already have my tiny house, I will install off-grid solar power or hybrid off-grid and on-grid system. I need to take matters into own hands because this problem will persist for a long, long time. Malampaya gas field is running out of reserves and then we have 5 gas-fed power plants that are reliant on Malampaya, which provides electricity to Luzon. We still don’t have an LNG terminal, we still don’t have an alternative to Malampaya.

Basically, this problem has been the government’s neglect. It doesn’t matter whose administration’s fault is this since this has spanned four presidents already. Trying to explain the issue and write the solutions (long-term and band-aid) is like writing a thesis.

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This is one of the reasons why I invested in dual monitors: I can multitask. But this is extreme multi-tasking as I am streaming two conferences. I paid attention to the one on the right since this is shorter and it yielded me a story, while the one on the left I muted for a while until I finished the other one. Anyway, this conference will run until Thursday and I was able to take down notes for a bit from this session.

I had four conferences this morning, back-to-back-to-back-to-back. And I wrote a time-sensitive story right after. I was still tweaking the story at past 5 pm, which got published at 8 pm. I still have three more stories to write for this week before I go off next week.

Meanwhile, my cats have been Zoom-bombing my press conferences. Good thing I didn’t need to turn on my camera for some of the sessions.

And they occupied my chair. They stayed in my room the entire day I was slaving away. They always want to be in the same place where I am, even when I’m in the bathroom.