Former energy secretary Francisco Viray has predicted that the country would have enough power supply to fill up the increasing demand for electricity over the next few years.

Viray noted that the lingering global crisis has bought enough time to build new power plants in Luzon and Mindanao that was anticipated earlier to suffer electricity shortages very soon.

In earlier government projections, Mindanao was seen to be hit with brownouts next year and Luzon in 2011.

“The minimal 0.5 percent growth in the domestic economy last year, and an expected minimal growth this year have frozen demand for electric power in Luzon. The region will have sufficient baseload capacity until 2015,” the former energy boss credited for solving the crippling brownouts in the early 1990s, said.

The same situation holds true in Mindanao, but the Visayas immediately needs 100 megawatts to meet the mounting demand for electricity in the central Philippine islands, Viray explained.

Viray, president of Trans-Asia Oil and Energy Development Corporation, a subsidiary of PHINMA group of companies, said that the conclusion was made using a conservative 1.04 percent growth in electricity demand to fuel one percent of economic growth.

The rule of thumb is a 1.5 percent growth in electricity demand to trigger every one percent growth in the domestic economy.

With tiny growth for two successive years, the Luzon grid still enjoys a comfortable 3,000 megawatts of reserve capacity, Viray pointed out. Luzon power plants can churn out 10,000 megawatts against the present demand of more or less 7,000 megawatts.

Also contributing to the postponement of crippling brownouts has been the rehabilitation of power plants in Luzon after most of them were sold out to private investors.

When government runs old power plants, these usually run on only 50 percent capacity.

With the rehabilitation of some of the older coal and geothermal plants, their efficiency are expected to get closer to full capacity under private sector management.