Iloilo city: Consumers in Iloilo City are encouraged to observe energy conservation measures after the Visayas grid was placed on yellow alert status following the 6.9 magnitude earthquake off Cebu on Tuesday evening. Mayor Raisa Tre±as made the appeal Wednesday following the announcement of the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) that the Visayas grid has lost around 1,444.1 megawatts (MW) after most power plants were affected by the strong quake.

According to Philippines News Agency, in an advisory, NGCP said 27 plants are on forced outage due to the earthquake, 16 others have been unavailable even before the incident, while one is running on derated capacity, for a total of 1,654.7 MW unavailable to the grid. “A yellow alert is issued when the operating margin is insufficient to meet the transmission grid’s contingency requirement,” it said.

The peak demand for Visayas is 1,839 MW, while the available capacity is 1,888 MW. The yellow alert, issued at 8 a.m., said the alert will take effect from 1 p.m. and will last until 12 midnight.

In an interview, Angel Tan, spokesperson for More Electric and Power Corp., said they are closely monitoring the situation. For now, she said they have no communication from NGCP for the implementation of possible manual load dropping. She, however, urged consumers to be mindful of their energy use. She added that upon their inspection, the power utility firm has not recorded any damage in its facilities.