When ‘last resort’ becomes routine

For 18 days this June, Iloilo City kept losing power on a schedule that began to feel less like an emergency and more like a habit. Seven Manual Load Dropping advisories. A string of yellow alerts. One red alert on June 10, when the Visayas Grid had 2,429 megawatts on hand against 2,421 megawatts of demand – a margin of 8 megawatts. On a system serving more than 2,400, that is not a cushion. That is luck.

The Institute of Contemporary Economics calls this what it is: a fragile grid, not a run of bad weather. And it is right to point first at the Department of Energy. The Electric Power Industry Reform Act hands the department the job of planning, integration, reliability, and reserve adequacy. So the question is blunt but fair – how were reserves allowed to thin to 8 megawatts, and who signed off on that as acceptable? Thirteen plants sat on forced outage or derated status by June 19. Blame the Mindanao earthquake, the imports that never arrived, the heat. The margins were already paper-thin before any of it.

Now the money. Iloilo is not a sleepy port anymore. Its 2024 economy was worth PHP 210.97 billion – roughly PHP 578 million in output a day, about PHP 24.1 million an hour – and Panay’s power demand grew 18.5% a year between 2020 and 2023, the fastest in the Visayas. The city outgrew its grid and kept building. The institute puts the monthly exposure from curtailment somewhere between PHP 90 million and PHP 169 million. Worth saying plainly: that is output at risk, not money set on fire. Some of it is deferred, some covered by generators, some recovered later. Overstate it and you hand the utilities an easy rebuttal.

The figure also hides who actually pays. Primelectric told the Department of Energy that MORE Power alone logged 135,364 affected customers and 340,990 kilowatt-hours lost in a single window. Behind that number sits the sari-sari store burning diesel it cannot afford, the dialysis patient watching the clock, the night-shift worker whose pay does not survive two dark hours. Most outages hit in the late afternoon and early evening – exactly when families cook, study, and tend to the sick.

And no, the fix is not to punish solar. Solar supplied 5.8% of Visayas generation last year. Energy Regulatory Commission Chairperson Francis Saturnino C. Juan named the real gap back in May: a flexibility shortage in the hours after the sun goes down. What the grid lacks is firm, dispatchable evening capacity and storage, not fewer panels.

Two things, then, before the next dry season. Make reserve adequacy binding. And publish every Manual Load Dropping order, event by event, so anyone can count them. The unconfirmed Leyte-Cebu transfer cut shows how secrecy alone can stall accountability – the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines should confirm it or put it to rest.

A healthy grid treats curtailment as a last resort. A failing one starts to expect it.