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By Antonio Colina IV

DAVAO City–A power plant is scheduled to shut down for almost a month one of its power generators here, a move that would further reduce the Mindanao grid’s power generation capacity by 150 mw.

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Therma South Inc. (TSI) announced on Tuesday that it would shut down the 150-megawatt Unit 2 of its coal-fired power plant in Barangay Binugao in Toril.

TSI, a wholly owned subsidiary of Aboitiz Power Corp., said the shutdown will last from June 18 to July 16 to facilitate maintenance works.

The shutdown would mean a loss of 130 mw from the Mindanao grid, 20 mw being the house load or the capacity needed to run the system.

TSI has scheduled another maintenance shutdown on Unit 1 later this year.

“Power plants have planned shutdowns for it to run optimally and reliably,” the statement said.

It added the power firm coordinated with the National Grid Corp. of the Philippines on its plans to implement maintenance shutdowns so that their schedules would not coincide with those of other power plants.

“We are confident that after this outage, TSI should be better equipped to reliably meet the needs of our customers as the rainy season begins in Mindanao. We will try our best to keep the duration of this interruption to a minimum,” said TSI president and chief operations officer Sebastian Lacson.

The P35-billion coal-plant was inaugurated in Jan. 8 and has since experienced four shutdowns – once for TSI 1 and thrice for TSI 2.

The first shutdown for TSI 2 lasted for eight days, from Jan. 26 to Feb. 2, followed by a 10-day shutdown from Feb. 16 to 26 and then on March 3.

TSI 1, meanwhile, bogged down in April 6 but was synchronized back to the grid in April 17.

The tripping was triggered by an incident where a tree fell on NGCP’s Davao-Toril 138-kilovolt transmission line.

A total of 100 mw has been contracted to Davao Light and Power Co., another subsidiary of Aboitiz Power, while the rest would be delivered to more than 20 electric cooperatives and distribution utilities in Caraga, Cotabato, Sultan Kudarat, Sarangani, parts of Bukidnon, Misamis and Zamboanga Peninsula.

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