Palm Concepcion Power Corporation (PCPC), a power generation company, said its power plant went on an “unplanned outage” last week due to an “external grid event.”
PCPC is operating a two-unit circulating fluidized bed combustion coal-fired power plant in Barangay Nipa, Concepcion town, Iloilo province. Each unit has a capacity of 135 megawat (MW).
Engineer Albin Kintanar, PCPC operations and maintenance head, said: “The drop in grid voltage caused by the trip of power plants in Iloilo City resulted in an automatic trip of our plant.”
“This is a protective system meant to prevent major damage to our facility,” he explained.
Iloilo and other parts of Western Visayas experienced two power outages on Oct. 29 and 30 due to the simultaneous shutdown of power plants of PCPC and Iloilo City-based Panay Energy Development Corp. (PEDC).
“Our team tried to put back the plant online but the unstable grid voltage caused delay in starting of the plant’s auxiliaries ultimately affecting the start-up of the power plant unit,” said Kintanar said.
“This tripping also caused critical issues in the boiler and turbine of the Concepcion plant,” he added.
Kintanar said they were able to get back the plant online in 3 and a half days.
PCPC disconnected from the Visayas grid at 5:27 p.m. on Oct. 29 was synchronized to the grid at 11:00 a.m. on Nov. 2.
“Nobody wants this untoward incident to happen, since the negative impact caused by the power outage affected not only our power consumers but also us in PCPC, and we want to assure all our customers that we will continue to work tirelessly to deliver our commitment of a stable power supply,” Kintanar stressed.
The Department of Energy (DOE) is currently conducting an investigation to find out the root cause of the two widespread power outages.IMT
