Isolated outages fail to disrupt voting
By Amy R. Remo, Inquirer Bureaus
Isolated outages in the country did not disrupt voting on Election Day, as the energy department said the overall power supply was normal.
Isolated outages in the country did not disrupt voting on Election Day, as the energy department said the overall power supply was normal.
Minor power interruptions or outages hit at least three Mindanao areas on Monday but these had barely affected the conduct of the balloting, the Mindanao Development Authority (Minda) reported.
Energy Secretary Jericho Petilla on Friday called on oil companies to use their own generators for their operations at their gas stations, oil depots and similar facilities on Monday to ensure an adequate supply of electricity during the elections.
Brownouts hit a large portion of Metro Manila and provinces in Luzon on Wednesday as six major power plants on the island went on unscheduled shutdowns, five days before the election on May 13. By Wednesday evening, three power plants had gone back online.
Only by connecting Mindanao to the Luzon-Visayas power grid could the Philippines solve its on-and-off problem of electricity shortage in Mindanao, a member of the Senate energy committee said on Sunday.
There will be no more irritating daily four-hour brownouts in this province by August, but residents will have to pay as much as P10 per kilowatt hour for electricity to defray the cost of operating modular generating sets.
Apart from being the start of the work week, Mondays in many areas of Mindanao also signal the start of another episode of frequent brownouts.
Pantabangan town, which hosts one of the biggest dams in the country and the hydroelectric electric firm that supplies power to the Luzon power grid, has been suffering from a power outage since March 7 after its power supplier cut off the local distributor from its system due to mounting debts.
At least two provinces and a city in Luzon should brace for brownouts after the electric cooperatives serving them failed to pay billions of pesos in debt to power generation companies, including the state-run Power Sector Assets and Liabilities Management Corp. (Psalm).
Abra is getting back its power, hours after a blackout on Thursday, which residents had expected to last far longer than usual.
A spate of rotating brownouts is threatening to hit Luzon as the available power supply swung to low, precarious levels on Thursday.
Sixteen areas in Mindanao are no longer experiencing brownouts due to a memo issued last month by the Department of Energy directing electric cooperatives to nominate their needed power to supply their demands, a Malacañang official said on Tuesday.
The fall of a 69-kV electric post near the Redemptorist church here caused an hour-long brownout in the downtown area on Tuesday, but the Aboitiz-owned Davao Light and Power Company (DLPC) assured consumers this was not part of the rotational brownout caused by power shortage in Mindanao.
