Articles, essays, and talks of Rey Lugtu

(Published in Manila Standard Today under the Greenlight column, April 12, 2010) Hours of brownout plagued Mindanao at the start of the year, crippling business output by fifty percent. The Mindanao Grid continued to experience generation deficiency because of the limited available capacity of the state-run National Power Corp.’s hydropower plants, most of whose water reservoirs are drying up because of El Niño. In the Visayas, the Cebu Energy Development Corp.’s coal unit had to undergo an emergency shutdown in March, significantly cutting down the Visayas Grid’s available capacity. In the meantime, the second unit of the Palinpinon geothermal facility in Negros Oriental, went on an emergency shutdown, causing the Visayas Grid to lose some badly needed capacity. Bad luck or just plain and simple lack of foresight? Whatever it is, the whole value chain of power supply – from generation, to transmission, to distribution - needs to undergo transformation to make the power grids...