NGCP lifts red alert status on Luzon grid, retains yellow alert

The National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) has lifted the red alert status on the Luzon Grid scheduled on Monday afternoon, as two major plants have gone back online.

In an advisory, the NGCP said the red alert status — scheduled at 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. — was officially lifted as of 11:30 a.m.

A red alert indicates that there are no ancillary services or a generation deficiency exists.

The NGCP noted, however, that the Luzon Grid will remain under yellow alert status — indicating that the grid has thin reserves based on supply and demand — from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m., and from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m.

NGCP Spokesperson Cynthia Alabanza earlier said the alert level status could possibly be lifted, after two plants were back online before noon.

“Posible pong ma-cancel o ma-upgrade ‘yung grid alert. ‘Yung mga yellow alert this afternoon tsaka ngayong gabi, posible hong ma-cancel altogether,” she said in an interview on Super Radyo DZBB.

Alabanza did not elaborate on the two plants, as she said the NGCP was still in the process of verifying reports.

The NGCP earlier said six power plants were reported to have been on forced outage while three were running on derated capacities for a total of 2,648 megawatts unavailable to the grid.

“Hindi po siya bahagi sa planned maintenance schedule. Biglaang emergency shutdown na wala sa plano, kaya ho hindi natin to na-foresee,” Alabanza said.

(This is not part of the planned maintenance schedule. This happened suddenly so we did not foresee this.)

For its part, the Manila Electric Company (Meralco) said it has committed a de-loading capacity of 346.40 megawatts under the interruptible load program (ILP).

“We are monitoring the situation and ready to implement manual load dropping (MLD) or rotating power interruptions if instructed by NGCP as part of our responsibility to manage the system,” it said in a separate statement. —Jon Viktor D. Cabuenas/KBK, GMA Integrated News