Aboitiz, Lopez plants on‘outages’Power generating facilities of the country’s key industry players are on shutdown – with the Davao coal-fired plant of the Aboitiz group on scheduled downtime; while the Malitbog geothermal plant of the Lopez group in the Visayas on “tripping-induced outage.”(MB File Photo)Aboitiz Power Corporation, in a disclosure to the Philippine Stock Exchange (PSE), has noted that one unit of its Therma South, Inc. (TSI) plant at 150-megawatt capacity is on maintenance outage starting August 22. TSI President and Chief Operating Officer Sebastian R. Lacson explained that “this maintenance activity is necessary to review Unit 1 and to implement some corrective measures as needed.”He said “this is similar in nature to the coverage of work done in the recently-planned outage of Unit 2 from June 18 to July 13.” The TSI coal-fired power plant is of 300MW capacity – with its unit 2 having parallel capacity of 150MW. Lacson guaranteed that “after this outage, TSI should be better equipped to reliably meet the needs of our customers,” while giving word that “we will try our best to keep the duration of this interruption to a minimum.”The TSI executive added maintenance activity at their plant’s unit 1 has already been moved from originally August 6, or deferred by roughly two weeks to August 22. Lacson said “TSI is coordinating with its customers – electric cooperatives and distribution utilities in Mindanao – in order to implement measures to mitigate the impact of the maintenance activity.”Over in the Visayas grid, Lopez-run Energy Development Corporation (EDC) has apprised the local bourse that the 77MW unit 2 of its Malitbog geothermal plant tripped last week after experiencing “flashover inside (its) high voltage terminal box.”EDC noted that “at the time of the incident, Malitbog 2 was offline and was in the process of testing and commissioning of its Automatic Voltage Regulator (AVR),” under the supervision of European firm ABB, the manufacturer of the equipment. The company further qualified that “the incident did not have any impact on the grid as Malitbog unit 2 was not synchronized to the grid at that time, and no injuries were sustained by any of the personnel involved.”EDC added that ABB and its consultants “are currently conducting an assessment of the extent of the repairs needed and a full review to determine all contributing factors that led to the plant incident to ensure appropriate measures to enable the safe and reliable operation of the unit.”

Source: Manila Bulletin August 22, 2016 14:22 UTC