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Friday, September 02, 2005
Cebu ‘now brownout-free for 5-7 years’
By Liberty A. Pinili
Sun.Star Staff Reporter
With almost 400 megawatts of geothermal power from Leyte, the province of Cebu will not experience brownouts for five to seven years, said National Transmission Corp. (Transco) president Alan Ortiz.
But while demand in Cebu will increase and energy from Leyte will no longer be sufficient, Ortiz said in a phone interview that by then the proposed coal power plants in Naga town and Toledo City will become operational.
Transco inaugurated a vital component of the Leyte-Cebu Interconnection Uprating Project (LCIUP), a 150-megavolt ampere transformer in Compostela town.
The newly installed transformer in Compostela was energized together with the completion and activation of the LCIUP last Aug. 23.
Ortiz made a presentation yesterday during an energy development forum at the Midtown Hotel in Cebu City.
Mark Israel of the Cebu Alliance for Renewable Energy (Care), in a separate interview, said that with additional power from Leyte, there is no longer any need for coal-fired power plants.
He said the LCIUP and the old submarine cable connecting Leyte and Cebu will answer Cebu’s power needs.
The old submarine
cable is capable of transmitting about 180 megawatts (mw) from Leyte’s geothermal plants to Cebu. Originally, the capacity of the Leyte-Cebu project was 200 mw, but this dropped when a segment of the submarine cable was replaced, after the original installation was damaged by the laying of equipment of the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co.
Demand
Transco’s presentation of the transmission development plan shows that Cebu’s actual system peak reached 417 mw in 2004. The system peak of the Cebu grid is projected to go up to 468 mw this year, 489 mw in 2006, 516 mw in 2007, 545 mw in 2008, 576 mw by 2009 and 611 mw the following year.
By 2014, the system peak in the Cebu grid is predicted to reach 776 mw.
As for the entire Visayas (Cebu, Panay, Bohol, Leyte-Samar and Negros) grid, the actual system peak in 2004 was 1,029 mw.
The Department of Energy (DoE) predicts that the entire Visayas will have a system peak of 1,849 mw by 2014.
Among the provinces in the Visayas grid, Cebu has the highest system peak. The lowest is Bohol, which was 54 mw in 2004.
Coal
Despite claims by the DOE that it has gathered inputs from concerned sectors to help revise the Power Development Plan, Care and other anti-coal power groups alleged that the energy department has failed to involve stakeholders in the energy development planning process.
Officials of Care, Responsible Ilonggos for Sustainable Energy (Rise) and the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) carried placards during yesterday’s forum, demanding that the DoE democratize the energy development planning process by involving various stakeholders.
(September 2, 2005 issue)
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