Senator Sherwin Gatchalian urged the Department of Energy to ensure enough power supply during the scheduled 20-day Malampaya natural gas field shutdown in October.
In a statement Friday, Gatchalian, chair of the Senate Committee on Energy, reminded the DOE officials to follow the Grid Operating and Maintenance Program (GOMP) to prevent the repeat of unplanned and forced outages in various areas in the country.
He highlighted the importance of backup plans, noting that 30% of the households in the country or around 6.575 million residential customers are getting their power source from Malampaya.
The Malampaya gas field will go offline from October 2 to 22 this year.
“We’ve been assured that brownouts will not happen during the summer season and that there’s sufficient supply, yet power interruption still took place from May 31 to June 2.
“I do not wish to call them out on this for the second time in a matter of just four months,” Gatchalian said.
Likewise, he said that he told the DOE that the country cannot afford to experience rotational brownouts especially with more hospitals treating more COVID-19 patients.
COVID-19 vaccine storage facilities also need an uninterrupted power supply, he added.
“There’s ample time to prepare for any eventuality. We expect the DOE to exhaust all means to ensure the continuity of flow of electricity to our homes and even avert hikes in electricity rates if the supply strain could be addressed ahead of time,” the senator pointed out.
In June this year, Gatchalian filed a resolution for a Senate inquiry into the previous rotational brownouts in Luzon.
Thus, a probe was launched to determine the cause of rotational brownouts despite DOE’s assurance that there is no high risk of supply shortage during the summer season.
Rotational brownouts hit some areas in Luzon on May 31 and June 1 due to low power supply, with the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) issuing power alerts to warm consumers of outages. —LBG, GMA News
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