Counting losses in the dark

Another yellow alert. Another red alert. The Visayas grid has choked for the 30th time this year.

Residents are left sweating in Iloilo City while bureaucrats in Manila debate timelines. Energy Secretary Sharon Garin calls the situation unacceptable. She is right. But the Department of Energy wants to fix the grid first and ask questions later. Consumers do not have the luxury of waiting for accountability.

Look at a recent electric bill. The ancillary services charge sits right there. Since the Energy Regulatory Commission passed Resolution No. 04 earlier this year, those rates jumped 30.85 percent to PHP 1.0391 per kilowatt-hour in July. That premium is an insurance policy against sudden plant outages. Yet when the grid crashed 30 times, those paid reserves never materialized.

Lawmakers from Negros Occidental, led by Representative Javier Miguel Benitez, are finally asking the billion-peso question. Who pocketed the cash if everyday consumers paid for an insurance policy that never paid out?

The National Grid Corporation of the Philippines claims the money simply passes through them to the generation companies and the Reserve Market. The public deserves names. Open the ledger.

Every centavo squeezed from a minimum wage earner in Bacolod or a struggling carinderia owner in Jaro demands a reckoning. The localized economic bleed is staggering. Manual load dropping sounds like a sterile technical process, but on the ground the reality is brutal. A local bakery tosses out ruined dough. A clinic fires up a loud, diesel-guzzling generator just to keep vaccines cold. It translates directly to lost wages.

Garin argues the most expensive electricity is no electricity at all. True. But paying a premium for emergency reserves that never arrive is outright theft.

Now the government wants a quick fix. The DOE is pushing to fast-track 253 megawatts of Battery Energy Storage Systems across the Visayas. Fifty megawatts are slated for Panay facilities in Panitan and Dingle. The region desperately needs that buffer. NGCP warns that rushing the commissioning process without proper testing could destabilize the entire system.

This creates a dangerous technical tug-of-war.

Business owners want the batteries online tomorrow. Improperly integrated storage, however, turns a local brownout into a regional blackout. Rapid deployment requires independent engineers looking over the shoulders of grid operators. They must ensure no one breaks the grid trying to save it.

This crisis exposes a fragile, interconnected house of cards. The Mindanao-Visayas submarine cable was supposed to act as a savior by sending surplus power north. It was a convenient political promise. With Mindanao facing its own localized outages, the excess capacity trickling into the Visayas amounts to a drop in a leaking bucket. The interconnected system remains entirely dependent on aging plants that constantly trip.

Eight plants went on forced outage this September alone. Fourteen others are running on derated capacities. The region severely lacks local baseload power.

The DOE expects new baseload plants in the Visayas by 2028. That target is two years away. Two years of rolling the dice every afternoon, waiting to see if the current plants hold together. Two years of paying for phantom reserves.

Bureaucrats preach patience while waiting for the grid to stabilize. Try selling patience to a business owner counting daily losses in the dark.