Economic losses due to 2-day rotating brownouts cost P116M —Gatchalian

The two-day rotating brownouts experienced by the Luzon grid early last week cost more than a hundred million pesos in economic losses in Meralco’s franchise area alone, Senator Sherwin Gatchalian said Thursday.

“Last May 31 and June 1 we’ve experienced rotational brownouts in different parts of the country, and those rotational brownouts affected close to 705,000 customers in two days. This is just only in the Meralco franchise,” Gatchalian said in his remarks during the Senate Committee on Energy hearing on power supply shortages.

“We ran estimates, we valued [that] the two-day loss equated to P116 million in economic losses. This is only taken within the Meralco franchise, [we're] not even talking about the economic losses experienced by the electric coops,” he added.

Meralco, or Manila Electric Co., is the country’s largest electricity distribution company, with a franchise area of 9,685 square kilometers, encompassing 36 cities and 75 municipalities, including Metro Manila, all of the provinces of Rizal, Cavite and Bulacan, and parts of Pampanga, Batangas, Laguna and Quezon.

Rotating brownouts were experienced by power consumers in Luzon last week after the National Grid Corp. of the Philippines implemented manual load dropping to maintain the integrity of its system as power supply became insufficient due to unplanned outages of power plants while demand was high.

“So again, two day loss, the two day brownouts, these are the rotational brownouts equated to P116 million and just to give context we’re now trying to recover from the pandemic and in fact the government is trying to reopen the economy as quick as possible. That’s why when these rotational brownouts hit the country, the first person who I saw pleading was the Secretary of Trade and Industry, Secretary Mon Lopez, because he is very concerned with the reopening of our economy,” Gatchalian said.

The Department of Energy is now looking into a possible “sabotage” and is considering the filing of cases against power plant operators following the three consecutive days that the Luzon grid had been placed under Red Alert due to the outages of several power plants.

The DOE sought the help of the Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC), Philippine Competition Commission (PCC), and the Department of Justice (DOJ) in looking into possible collusion among generation firms.

Gatchalian said the private sector will start importing their share of vaccines and the local government units are also importing their own shares.

“I saw on the news that by the end of this month we will have approximately 21 million vaccines in inventory in the country. So meaning the whole country will be rolling out activities,” Gatchalian said.

“More so we need electricity to be present and continuous because of this vaccine rollout,” he said. —KBK, GMA News