Aboitiz’s coal plants to undergo month-long shutdown; brownouts expected

KIDAPAWAN CITY – Therma South Inc., a subsidiary of Aboitiz Power, will undergo a four-week planned shutdown on one of its two 150-MW units starting June 18.

Wilfredo Rodolfo III, communications officer of Aboitiz Power, said TSI management has already coordinated its schedule with the Mindanao system operator of the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) so its maintenance works would be conducted ahead of those of other power plants in Mindanao.

“Power plants have planned shutdowns for it to run optimally and reliably,” he stressed.

TSI’s Unit Number 2 will undergo maintenance shutdown starting June 18 while its Unit 1, also with a capacity of 150 megawatts, would be scheduled later in 2016.

Sebastian Lacson, TSI president and chief operations officer, said they are confident that after the outage, their power plants would be better equipped to reliably meet the needs of their customers as the rainy season has officially begun.

PAGASA declared the onset of rainy season on Tuesday.

“We will try our best to keep the duration of this interruption to a minimum," Lacson said.

The planned outage will affect North Cotabato, in particular.

The Cotabato Electric Cooperative (Cotelco), service provider for North Cotabato, bought 10 megawatts of power from TSI’s coal-fired power plants.

Cotelco said that because of the planned outage, their power costumers are again expecting two to three hours of load curtailment or brownouts in June. —KG, GMA News