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Manila Bulletin devider Philippines devider National devider Villanueva seeks Senate probe into 7 power plants' sudden shutdown

Villanueva seeks Senate probe into 7 power plants' sudden shutdown

Published Sep 13, 2022 05:55 pm

Senate Majority Leader Joel Villanueva on Tuesday, September 13 said the Senate should look into what is the cause of the simultaneous, forced, and unplanned outages of several power plants in the Luzon Grid, which led to the red alert in power supply and the rotating brownouts.

Senator Joel Villanueva (Senate of the Philippines)

‘’This happened despite the DOE (Department of Energy) assuring us during the September 6 hearing of the Senate committee on energy that the Luzon grid can meet the power demand until October,’’ he said.

Villanueva strongly suggested that the Executive branch initiate short-term adjustments to prevent similar shortages from happening in the next year or so.

‘’As for medium- to long-term solutions, we expect the DOE to lay out its plans to root out and solve this problem. Definitely, this issue will be brought up during the budget deliberations on DOE’s 2023 budget,’’ he said.

‘’On the part of the legislature, we will study how we can further promote renewable energy sources for the country to prevent supply shortages in the future,’’ he added.

Reacting to the power outages in Luzon, Senator Juan Edgardo ‘’Sonny’’ M. Angara, chairman of the Senate finance committee, said that the country faced a similar problem in the 1990s.

‘’We should see how to incentivise and speed up the building of new power plants,’’ he added.

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