MANILA – The Department of Energy (DOE) said it sees no major impact on the power supply in Luzon while the Malampaya gas field will undergo a scheduled maintenance shutdown from Nov. 14 to 27.
In an online media briefing Wednesday, DOE Assistant Secretary Redentor Delola said the power supply for Luzon will be augmented by Sual power plant, which is currently on outage, when Malampaya will go offline.
“We have an outage of Sual as of the moment. That’s the schedule we did to accommodate the maintenance of Malampaya by the middle of November. By that time, supply from Sual will be back. So we are expecting there will not be a major impact on supply in Luzon. So we will still have sufficient supply,” he said in mixed English and Filipino.
Delola added there are other power plant maintenance activities coinciding with the scheduled shutdown of Malampaya, but pointed out that this should not affect the overall power supply in Luzon.
“There are gas plants capable of operating on liquid fuel. If there is no supply from Malampaya, they can convert to liquid fuel,” the DOE official said.
Meanwhile, six power plants with installed capacity of 2,199 megawatts went offline as a contingency measure to avoid damages from Super Typhoon Rolly.
These power plants include Tiwi geothermal power plant, Bacman geothermal power plant, Mak-Ban geothermal power plant, Ilijan natural gas-fired power plant, Santa Rita power plant, and San Lorenzo power plant.
Delola said operations of the natural gas complex are already back, while the BacMan power plant is targeted to be reenergized this week.
He added the Tiwi geothermal facility is still offline as there are some restorations needed in the transmission line connecting the plants.
On the other hand, coal-fired power plant Pagbilao 1 is also back online after it was also affected by the typhoon.
“Moving forward towards the end of the week and even the next week, we don’t expect any issues in supply in the entire Luzon given these outages that these plants have encountered,” Delola said. (PNA)
