We knew this was coming

The energy emergency was not a surprise. It just took a war to make us admit it.

When President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. signed Executive Order No. 110 on March 24 declaring a state of national energy emergency, the language was urgent — “imminent danger,” emergency committees, the whole apparatus of crisis response. What the order couldn’t quite hide was that none of the underlying conditions were new.

The Philippines has been sourcing 98% of its crude oil from the Middle East for years. It imports 91% of its liquefied petroleum gas from Asian refineries that are themselves dependent on the Persian Gulf. It has, at last count, roughly 45 days of fuel reserves.

Energy Secretary Sharon Garin confirmed all of this publicly, as if the numbers were a revelation rather than a policy record. But they weren’t. Rather, they were a choice — or more precisely, a long series of deferred choices.

Diesel has already passed PHP 100 per liter, with another PHP 11.88 per liter increase expected as of the week of March 23 alone. Year-to-date, consumers have absorbed net increases of PHP 57.55 per liter on diesel and PHP 36.30 on gasoline. The Department of Economy, Planning and Development is now projecting GDP growth could slow to 3.5–4% in a worst-case scenario. MUFG Research puts it bluntly: every USD 10 per barrel increase in oil cuts Philippine GDP growth by 0.2 percentage points and pushes inflation up by 0.6 points. The peso is already past PHP 60 to the dollar — a record low.

None of this happened because of the Gulf crisis. The Gulf crisis just removed the comfortable fiction that we had things under control.

Here’s what makes this particularly hard to stomach: the alternatives were never unavailable. The Institute for Climate and Sustainable Cities has been mapping the country’s solar potential for years. Its SPECTRUM tool has already detected over 3,000 MW of existing rooftop solar capacity nationwide.

ICSC Senior Policy Advisor Atty. Pedro Maniego Jr. put it plainly — solar and battery storage are already cheaper than coal and LNG, they don’t require land conversion, and they generate power where it’s actually needed. Ember’s latest analysis backs this up at the regional scale: generating ASEAN’s projected new electricity demand with solar would cost roughly USD 42 billion annually, compared to USD 71–109 billion for the equivalent gas-fired capacity.

The Green Energy Auction program exists. The Renewable Energy Act has been on the books since 2008. The DOE has an aggressive 10-year roadmap targeting PHP 25 trillion in renewable investments and 25 GW of new capacity by 2035. The policy architecture, in other words, is not the problem.

ICSC Grid Modernization Advisor Engr. Gaspar Escobar Jr. was measured about it, but the point landed: “While strong policies are already in place, their implementation hasn’t been as aggressive as needed in the past.” That’s a careful way of saying we had the map and still missed the turn.

What we’re paying now — at the pump, in electricity bills, in peso depreciation — is the cost of that gap between policy and action. Generation charges in the Meralco franchise area have already risen from roughly PHP 6 per kilowatt-hour in 2023 to PHP 8 per kilowatt-hour in 2025, a 33% increase tied directly to LNG exposure.

The Visayas grid, meanwhile, is structurally dependent on power imports just to avoid going negative — and the ICSC report is already projecting yellow alerts for May even with those imports flowing.

The government’s immediate responses — work-from-home orders, fuel excise tax suspensions, the UPLIFT Committee — are reasonable stopgaps. But stopgaps are not strategy. The real question, the one that tends to get lost in the noise of emergency declarations, is whether the crisis is finally enough to close the gap between what we say about renewable energy and what we actually build.

The technology is not waiting for us. The economics already decided. What’s left is the political will to stop treating every energy crisis as an isolated emergency and start treating it as the predictable consequence of decisions we keep not making.