Iloilo City without power for 5 hours as blackout hits Panay

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ILOILO CITY – The entire island of Panay experienced a blackout Friday night, with Iloilo City suffering the most as it went without electricity for more than five hours.

It was not clear Saturday what exactly caused the blackout, which affected the provinces of Iloilo, Aklan, Antique and Capiz.

The blackout started about 9:20 p.m. Friday and lasted until 2:30 a.m. Saturday in most of Iloilo City. It lasted for at least two hours in Aklan and around 30 to 45 minutes in Antique and Capiz.

The Global Business Power Corp., which operates a 164-megawatt coal-fired plant through its subsidiary Panay Energy Development Corp., and diesel powers plant of the Panay Power Corp., another subsidiary, said only that its plants had automatically shut down.

“As part of its protection system, our (PEDC) coal plant and (PPC) power diesel plants shut down when [they] sensed transient fault along transmission line,” Nicelee Morales, GBPC Panay external relations officer, said in a statement.

Panay Energy Development Corp. supplies 65 mw from its coal plant to the Panay Electric Company, Iloilo City’s lone power distributor. Another 15 mw is supplied by diesel plants of the Panay Power Corp.

PEDC is also the main power supplier of the provinces of Iloilo, Aklan, Antique and Capiz, providing from 70 to 80 mw to these areas, Nilo Madrid, Global vice president for Panay site operations, told the Philippine Daily Inquirer in an interview.

Madrid said the automatic safety features of the plants were designed to protect them from damage when there are sudden changes in the interconnection system.

He said their system recognized an undervoltage from the transmission grid which triggered the automatic shutdown.

Morales said the National Grid Corp. of the Philippines reported that the transmission line connecting Bacolod City in Negros Occidental and Barotac Viejo in Iloilo tripped or had shut down at 9:26 p.m., triggering the generation plant shutdown.

But Elmer Cruz, NGCP Visayas corporate communications and public affairs officer, said the outage was due to power generation problems.

An official of the Department of Energy, who asked not to be identified for lack of authority to issue a statement, said the agency was still getting details on what triggered the blackout and the sequence of events.

But the official said a 37-mw unit of the Palinpinon geothermal plant in Negros Occidental also tripped, citing an NGCP report.

Madrid said the blackout lasted for several hours in Iloilo City because it took time for the coal plant to be fully restored after the automatic shutdown.

He said it normally took from five to six hours for the coal plant to restore its power supply after a shutdown.

One of the two units of the coal plant was able to supply power around 3:30 a.m. on Saturday with full restoration at 8 a.m.

The Panay Power Corp. diesel plants started supplying power to Panay Electric Co.  at 11:14 p.m. Friday, according to Morales.

Randy Pastolero, Peco vice president for operations, said that while only one of their substations suffered a shutdown, they were able to fully restore power to Iloilo City early Saturday because of the shutdown of PEDC’s coal plant.