Brownouts hit Cagayan amid heat
BAYOMBONG, Nueva Vizcaya—Tuguegarao City and two towns in Cagayan province are in for hotter days as power will be shut off for nine hours each today (Thursday) and tomorrow (Friday) as temperatures there hit record high on Wednesday.
Tito Lingan, general manager of the Cagayan 1 Electric Cooperative (Cagelco I), said the power interruption would be experienced in Tuguegarao and portions of Alcala and Amulung towns from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. today as the cooperative repairs power lines there.
On Friday, at least seven villages each in Alcala and Amulung will also suffer day-long outages, according to a Cagelco I notice posted online.
Residents said the power interruption could not come at a worse time because they depend on air conditioning and electric fans in their homes,offices and public areas to help them cope with the heat.
Income affected
“I cannot imagine how we can survive a day without power with these soaring temperature. Worse, this also means no income for us for a day,” said Rodolfo Ballad, who operates a photocopying shop in Barangay Caritan Sur in Tuguegarao.
On Wednesday, temperatures peaked at 38.7 degrees Celsius in Tuguegarao, the highest recorded for the year, according to the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (Pagasa) station there.
Dependent on genset
“There is really not much [people] can do to fight off the heat under these kinds of circumstances. Those who are in offices would have to depend on generator sets while those in households, they just would have to stay under the trees for shade,” said Antonio Pagalilauan, Pagasa weather specialist.
Since June, temperature readings in Cagayan have recorded an average of 38 degrees Celsius, with a heat index reaching as high as 44 degrees.
But the outages have added to the woes of residents who have to endure 30-minute to two-hour power interruptions daily due to “load shedding” schemes by the National Grid Corp. of the Philippines (NGCP), alternately shutting down its transformers as precaution to possible breakdown.
The residents assailed Cagelco and NGCP for the intermittent outages which, they said, had caused inconvenience and damaged their home appliances.
Overheating
The extreme heat has pushed transformers on the brink of overheating, NGCP officials said, forcing them to operate at higher temperatures while having to absorb the high demand for power, especially from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m.
Alexander Alvarez, NGCP regional district head, has asked consumers to lessen power consumption during peak hours or to shift their use or operations to off-peak periods to ease the burden on their transformers.
“We hope that the present afternoon peak demand will [be trimmed] down once … summer is over,” Alvarez said in a letter to Lingan on June 10.
Benguet
A large section of Baguio City’s downtown area and its outskirt villages, and the towns of Sablan and La Trinidad and parts of Tublay, all in Benguet province, will also experience a nine-hour power interruption today as the Benguet Electric Cooperative and the NGCP will replace electric poles and work on transmission lines.
