‘DANCING WITH OUR HANDS TIED’: No new power plants, no end to Visayas brownouts: NGCP

ILOILO CITY — The National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) said on Thursday, Sept. 24, that while it has been doing its best to improve transmission, the Visayas power crisis cannot be solved if supply does not increase.

Neil Martin Modina, NGCP assistant vice president and head of Visayas systems operations, said almost all the power issues across the Visayas were caused by generation problems.

While insufficient generation is the leading cause, the NGCP also cited scheduled shutdowns of transmission and distribution systems connected to customers, as well as unscheduled shutdowns of generation, transmission, or distribution facilities.

“Power interruptions are caused, notably here [in the Visayas], by insufficient generators, meaning that the supply, the generators, are lacking,” Modina said during the NGCP’s Power 101 session with the media on Thursday.

Generation behind most grid alerts

He cited NGCP data showing that from 2016 to 2025, the grid operator issued 1,122 grid alerts, consisting of 243 red alerts and 879 yellow alerts.

A red alert indicates unavailable power supply due to zero contingency reserves, generation deficiencies, and critical loading or imminent overloading in the transmission system.

A yellow alert indicates critically low supply, with contingency reserves smaller than the capacity of the largest generating unit online.

Generation supply issues accounted for 235, or 96.7%, of the red alerts, while transmission issues and combined generation and transmission issues accounted for four each.

Generation supply concerns likewise caused 875 of the yellow alerts, with the remaining four stemming from combined generation and transmission issues.

The NGCP’s latest data also showed that the Visayas recorded the highest rate of unplanned power plant shutdowns at 85.03%, compared with 69.60% in Mindanao and 69.45% in Luzon.

Near-daily alerts since May

This year, the NGCP has issued red and yellow alerts almost daily since May.

Its monitoring data showed the alerts began between May 12 and May 16 due to the unavailability of coal plant units TVI 1 and 2 in Toledo City, Cebu, and PEDC 3 in Iloilo City.

TVI refers to Therma Visayas Inc., a subsidiary of Aboitiz Power Corp., while PEDC refers to Panay Energy Development Corp., which operates a coal-fired power plant in La Paz, Iloilo City.

TVI 2, installed in September 2019, was the last power plant commissioned in the Visayas.

The only period of continuous normal load this year was from July 18 to Aug. 2.

Modina stressed that the country must build reliable and stable power plants in the right places to meet power demand.

He said the unavailability of PEDC Unit 3 meant that Panay Island had to source an additional 75 megawatts (MW) of power from Negros.

He also noted that Cebu’s demand stood at 1,300 MW while local supply was only around 900 MW, forcing it to draw additional supply from the Mindanao grid.

“With Panay’s consumption, if one plant, with the biggest being [PEDC 3], is unavailable, you are getting power from Negros. You are now lacking 75 MW. That means you cannot sustain on an island if you lack one [power] plant,” the NGCP official said.

“What the electric [power] industry wants is that Panay can sustain, [or] self-sufficiency. If you lose one plant, others should continue to run,” he added.

Grid operator, not power producer

Modina said the NGCP’s key responsibilities under its franchise include delivering power from generators to distribution utilities; system operations through grid management and dispatch, including ancillary services; and comprehensive metering services at substations.

“To be specific, we have nothing to do with [power] generation. We just carry the output of the generators, which are privately owned. The NGCP is monitoring 274 generators,” he said.

Because of the alerts brought on by the meager supply, the NGCP has had to implement manual load dropping (MLD), which involves balancing the power distributed across the grid.

Under MLD, the grid operator directs the deliberate, temporary interruption of power to portions of the grid when available supply cannot meet demand, to keep the system from collapsing.

From May to September, the grid operator rationed power among the Visayas islands according to demand, with Cebu receiving the largest share at 42%.

Panay Island followed at 21%, then Negros at 18%, Leyte at 13%, and Bohol at 8%.

Short- and long-term fixes

Modina also presented the NGCP’s recommendations, including the immediate restoration of power plants on forced outage as a short-term measure and a holistic, industry-wide, long-term energy development plan.

The long-term plan focuses on three critical areas: sufficient, non-intermittent, or baseload power supply; a balanced energy mix with geographically distributed plants; and resource adequacy-based planning to strengthen grid reliability.

“Based on information from the industry, plants will be constructed within five years, and the transmission, 10 years. We will start now, we will do this, but definitely NGCP is just the company transmitting power. We are not the ones building plants. […] The [ultimate] target is to not have a brownout,” he said.

Transmission gains since 2009

The NGCP also touted improvements in the power situation since it took over the operation of the country’s grid from government-owned entities in 2009.

The NGCP, a privately owned consortium, operates the country’s transmission network under a 50-year congressional franchise granted through Republic Act 9511 in 2008.

Its data showed that transmission outages from 2009 to 2025 dropped by 85.30% compared with the 2000-2008 period, including an 87.14% reduction in the Visayas.

In the Visayas, the NGCP has also completed several substation projects since 2023.

These include Stage 3 of the 230-kilovolt (kV) Cebu-Negros-Panay Backbone Project between Barotac Viejo, Iloilo, and E.B. Magalona, Negros Occidental, which added 300 megavolt-amperes (MVA) each in November 2023, January 2024, and March 2024.

The Visayas Substation Upgrading Project 2 between Dingle, Iloilo, and San Jose, Antique, added 50 MVA each in December 2024 and August 2025 and 100 MVA in November 2025.

The 138-kV Panay-Guimaras Interconnection Project added 100 MVA each in April and December 2025.