No updates from the NGCP before the Panay power grid goes down - House

The House Committee on Energy queries the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) on why the corporation was not able to update other energy agencies hours before the Panay Island blackout.

In a report by CNN Philippines, the NGCPsends their automated 30-minute updates via the Viber messaging app. However, last January 2,  updates stopped, with the last update being sent at 10 A.M.

Iloilo Representative Lorenz Defensor then questioned why the NGCP stopped its updates during that time when the systems operator (SO) usually updates every 30 minutes.

In response, the NGCP National System Operations Head Clark Agustin replied that the corporation is already looking into the reason for the lapse, saying that updates were sent when the plant tripped.

Furthermore, Agustin stressed that certain criteria were to be followed for incident reports. As per the Philippine Grid Code (PGC), a report is only sent out once multiple tripping of generators with automatic load dropping (ALD) occur.

Iloilo Rep. Defensor also sought the result of the Energy Regulatory Commission’s (ERC) investigation of the power outage.

ERC chairperson Monalisa Dimalanta replied that the commission worked with the SO because the recommended actions called for the participation of the NGCP, and as of November, almost all actions had been rendered complete.

With this, the officials said that even though NGCP complied, the power outage occurred because it neglected to communicate with its stakeholders before January 2.