Visayas: Power consumers served by 18 electric cooperatives in the Visayas may experience power outages from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. Thursday as the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) implements manual load dropping (MLD) to address low capacity.

According to Philippines News Agency, the Visayas grid is on yellow alert status from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m., as capacity is affected by the forced outage of three generation units of major coal-fired power plants since last week. NGCP has indicated that the MLD is necessary to address the declining capacity in the Visayas grid due to the forced outage of units 1 and 2 of Therma Visayas Inc. and unit 3 of the Panay Energy Development Corporation (PEDC).

These three generating units add to the more than 10 units that have been on forced outage since 2021. NGCP reports that 14 power plants in the Visayas are also on derated capacity, leading to a total reduction in the grid of around 870.2MW.

"Aside from the unavailability of Visayas' large coal plants TVI 1, TVI 2, and PEDC 3, the manual load dropping is being implemented to prevent the overloading of the Daanbantayan-Tabango 230kV due to the unplanned outage of CENPRI Diesel, PDPP1 Unit 5, PDPP3, PGPP2 Unit 1 amounting to 74MW," NGCP stated.

The NGCP also mentioned that the manual load dropping schedule might be cancelled if system conditions improve, such as if actual demand falls below projections. They encourage power consumers to exercise caution in using electricity.