When the lights go out, what kind of city is Iloilo?

There is something unsettling about watching an entire city go dark, especially when the darkness is no longer an unusual event but something people have learned to anticipate. We light candles, charge power banks, open windows, save our files, check our phones, and wait for electricity to return as though this were simply another part of the daily routine. In Iloilo, we have become remarkably skilled at adjusting our lives around interruptions that should never have become ordinary in the first place. The more troubling question is not why the lights go out, but why we have become so accustomed to reorganizing our lives whenever they do.

A power interruption is often described as an inconvenience, and that description is dangerously inadequate for the kind of city Iloilo is becoming. Electricity is no longer simply something that makes our homes comfortable because it now supports education, healthcare, commerce, communication, transportation, banking, manufacturing, publishing, creative work, and nearly every form of contemporary livelihood. When electricity disappears, the city does not merely become darker because its ability to function is temporarily reduced. When interruptions happen repeatedly, the problem becomes bigger than electricity because uncertainty itself begins to become part of everyday life.

This September, the continuing discussions about power reliability across the Visayas have made that uncertainty particularly difficult to ignore. The National Grid Corporation of the Philippines reported tight supply conditions in the Visayas, with available capacity at times falling below projected peak demand and several generating units unavailable. The situation prompted renewed discussions about immediate interventions, additional generation capacity, transmission reliability, and even calls for a proposed state of power emergency in the Visayas. These developments may sound technical when expressed through megawatts, generating units, grid alerts, and reserve margins, but behind every number is a person whose ordinary plans may have suddenly become impossible.

Consider the student who sits at a desk at eight o’clock in the evening with an assignment due the following morning. The laptop battery is already low, the room is becoming unbearably warm, and the internet connection may disappear along with the electricity. The student cannot simply manufacture another hour of battery life or create a quiet, cool, well-lit environment from nothing. When the electricity returns three hours later, the lost time does not return with it.

Think about the teacher preparing a lesson after a full day of work, the writer trying to meet a deadline, the translator finishing a manuscript, or the digital worker attending an online meeting with colleagues in Manila, Singapore, London, or New York. Their work depends on computers, routers, lights, cooling systems, chargers, and other devices that most of us barely notice when they function normally. When electricity disappears, productivity can stop instantly even though the deadline does not move. The city may eventually recover its electricity, but the worker may already have lost an opportunity, a client, an appointment, an income, or simply a valuable portion of the day.

The same problem becomes more complicated for small businesses that do not have the financial capacity to build elaborate backup systems. A restaurant depends on refrigeration, cooking equipment, lighting, payment systems, ventilation, and other electrical appliances that are essential to its operation. A bakery, salon, printing shop, coffee shop, online seller, home-based entrepreneur, and small manufacturing business can experience direct financial losses every time operations are disrupted. For a large corporation, redundancy may be a budget item, but for a small entrepreneur, redundancy can be an expense that competes directly with rent, wages, inventory, and household needs.

Hospitals present an even more serious dimension of the problem because some forms of electricity dependence leave no room for casual language about inconvenience. Medical facilities require reliable power for equipment, refrigeration, monitoring systems, information systems, lighting, ventilation, and other essential operations. Backup generators and other emergency systems can provide protection, but the existence of backup systems should not make unreliable primary infrastructure seem acceptable. A hospital may be prepared for an emergency, but a society should still ask why essential institutions must repeatedly prepare for conditions that should be exceptional.

This is why I increasingly resist the casual phrase, “brownout lang.” The phrase sounds harmless because it compresses a complicated infrastructure problem into something familiar and almost ordinary. It suggests that people should simply wait, adjust, complain briefly, and continue with their lives when the electricity returns. But a brownout is not merely a dark room because it can mean a canceled class, spoiled inventory, interrupted medical care, missed work, lost wages, damaged equipment, delayed production, or a student unable to finish an assignment.

The burden is also not equally distributed across the population. A corporation can install generators, battery storage, redundant internet connections, backup servers, and other systems designed to keep operations running when the grid fails. A wealthy household can purchase a generator or power station, while a middle-class family may improvise with rechargeable lamps, fans, and power banks. A low-income household may have nothing to do except wait in the heat and darkness until the electricity returns.

This means that power reliability is also an issue of inequality. When infrastructure becomes unreliable, people with resources can purchase protection from that unreliability while people with fewer resources are forced to absorb the consequences. The same interruption can therefore produce radically different experiences depending on where a person lives, what kind of work they do, how much money they earn, and what equipment they can afford. Saying that a brownout affects everyone may be technically correct, but it does not tell the whole social story.

Iloilo should take this seriously because we increasingly describe ourselves as a modern and growing city. We talk about investments, tourism, information technology, creative industries, business districts, universities, digital workers, entrepreneurs, new developments, and the possibility of building a stronger regional economy. We encourage young people to study, innovate, create, and participate in a global economy while remaining in Iloilo. But all these ambitions depend on infrastructure that people can trust.

A skyline is not proof of modernity. New buildings, shopping centers, condominiums, hotels, cafés, offices, and beautifully designed public spaces can certainly demonstrate economic activity, but they cannot by themselves prove that a city has become modern. Modernity is also measured by the reliability of the systems that allow ordinary people to live modern lives. If a city has sophisticated buildings but residents must constantly rearrange their schedules around uncertain electricity, then the contradiction deserves attention.

There is something particularly ironic about encouraging digital workers to remain in Iloilo while they must sometimes wonder whether they can complete a day’s work without interruption. Remote work is often presented as one of the opportunities available to a modern regional city because a person can theoretically work for a company anywhere in the world while living here. But that promise becomes fragile when the basic infrastructure required for remote work cannot be relied upon. You cannot convincingly sell a city as a destination for digital work if workers have to search for a café with a generator whenever the electricity disappears.

The same contradiction exists in education. We tell students that they live in a digital age where learning resources, online libraries, educational platforms, video lectures, research databases, and communication tools are increasingly available through the internet. We ask them to submit digital assignments, participate in online activities, create presentations, conduct research, and develop technological skills that will prepare them for the future. Yet we sometimes place those students in the position of having to decide whether to preserve the remaining battery on their laptop for an academic requirement or use it to communicate with their family.

As someone who works in education and writing, I cannot treat that contradiction as merely theoretical. A significant portion of contemporary academic and creative work happens through devices that require electricity, from drafting a manuscript and editing a document to conducting a class and communicating with students. The romantic image of a writer working by candlelight may look beautiful in a photograph, but it is a poor model for contemporary professional life. I would rather have a city where writers, teachers, students, and workers do not need romantic narratives about resilience simply because the infrastructure failed them.

This is where our language about resilience also deserves scrutiny. Filipinos are frequently praised for being resilient because we learn how to continue working despite floods, storms, transportation problems, power interruptions, financial difficulties, and other disruptions. Resilience is certainly a strength, but it can become a convenient word when institutions use the admirable ability of ordinary people to endure as a substitute for improving the conditions they are forced to endure. People should not have to prove their resilience every day simply to accomplish ordinary tasks.

There is a difference between asking citizens for patience and asking citizens to normalize failure. Patience makes sense when there is a clear plan, measurable progress, transparent communication, and credible accountability for the problems being addressed. Normalization happens when people eventually stop asking why a recurring problem exists and simply begin arranging their lives around it. The danger is that adaptation can make systemic problems less visible because people become experts at surviving them.

We have done this with many things. We adjust our schedules because of traffic, carry umbrellas because of sudden rain, avoid certain roads because of flooding, leave home earlier because transportation is unpredictable, and keep emergency supplies because disruptions are expected. We become so accustomed to these adjustments that we sometimes mistake our ability to cope for evidence that the system itself is functioning adequately. But a population that has learned to compensate for infrastructure failures is not necessarily a population being well served by its infrastructure.

Electricity is particularly revealing because we barely notice it when it works. We switch on a light and continue reading, turn on a fan and continue sleeping, open a laptop and continue working, place food in a refrigerator and forget about it, charge a phone overnight, print a document, send an email, conduct a class, process a payment, or upload a manuscript. The invisible reliability of electricity makes all these actions feel natural. When the power disappears, we suddenly realize how much of our ordinary life has been built around something we rarely think about.

That is why a power interruption can also be understood as a philosophical event. Darkness reveals the infrastructure underneath our routines and reminds us that modern life is sustained by systems that are mostly invisible when they work properly. We like to think of ourselves as independent individuals, but the ordinary things we accomplish every day depend on enormous networks of electricity, water, roads, telecommunications, logistics, healthcare, education, and public services. When one of those systems becomes unreliable, the limits of individual resilience become painfully obvious.

A city is ultimately an agreement between people and systems. People agree to live, work, study, invest, build families, establish businesses, create institutions, and imagine futures in a particular place because they expect certain basic systems to support those activities. Infrastructure is therefore more than concrete, steel, wires, transformers, substations, power plants, and transmission lines. Infrastructure is the physical expression of a promise that people should be able to organize their lives with some reasonable degree of certainty.

This is why the current discussions about additional power generation, restoration of generating units, transmission improvements, battery storage, energy diversification, and stronger grid reliability deserve public attention. Government agencies, utilities, energy companies, local governments, and other institutions all have different responsibilities within the system, and solving the problem will require coordination rather than a single announcement or isolated project. Recent discussions in the region have already focused on immediate restoration, additional baseload supply, a more balanced energy mix, geographically distributed generation, and improvements to grid reliability. Those proposals need to be followed not only by promises but by timelines, implementation, public reporting, and accountability.

People can understand that energy infrastructure is complicated. Generating plants require maintenance, transmission systems have technical limitations, new projects require regulatory processes, and additional capacity cannot be created overnight. What people should not be asked to accept indefinitely is uncertainty without a credible explanation of how that uncertainty will be reduced. The public deserves to know what is being repaired, what is being built, when projects are expected to become operational, what contingencies are available, and what measures are being taken to protect consumers and businesses during periods of shortage.

The conversation should also include the cost of interruption. How much productivity is lost when businesses close for several hours, how much income disappears for workers paid by the hour, how much food is spoiled, how many classes are disrupted, how many online transactions fail, and how many small enterprises absorb expenses that cannot be recovered? We often measure electricity in kilowatt-hours and pesos, but we should also measure it in lost opportunities, interrupted education, wasted labor, and postponed plans. The economic cost of unreliable power is not always visible on a utility bill.

There is also a cultural cost to unreliable infrastructure because it changes the way people imagine their own city. When residents repeatedly experience disruption, they begin to lower their expectations of what should be normal. They stop asking whether something can be made reliable and start asking only when the next interruption will happen. Eventually, the city develops a culture of anticipation in which people prepare for failure before they prepare for opportunity.

That is not the kind of urban culture I want for Iloilo. I want students to think about what they can learn rather than whether their laptop battery will survive the evening. I want small entrepreneurs to think about expanding their businesses rather than calculating how much another interruption might cost them. I want teachers, writers, artists, healthcare workers, and digital professionals to spend their energy doing their work rather than constantly improvising around infrastructure problems.

Iloilo has every reason to aspire to something better. We have universities, schools, hospitals, businesses, entrepreneurs, cultural institutions, creative communities, government agencies, and citizens who are already contributing to a city that wants to move forward. But moving forward requires more than announcing growth because growth becomes fragile when basic systems cannot keep pace with the ambitions placed upon them. A city cannot sustainably promise a better future while repeatedly asking its people to work around the weaknesses of the present.

Perhaps this is the question we should ask every time the lights go out: what exactly are we being asked to tolerate? Are we being asked to tolerate a temporary technical problem that is being responsibly addressed, or are we gradually being trained to accept unreliable infrastructure as an unavoidable feature of city life? Are we being asked for patience while solutions are implemented, or are we being asked to become permanently adaptable because nobody wants to confront the structural problem? The distinction matters because patience has an endpoint, while normalization can continue indefinitely.

A modern city should allow people to make plans. A student should be able to plan an evening of study, a business owner should be able to plan production, a hospital should be able to plan operations, a teacher should be able to plan a class, and a worker should be able to plan a working day without treating the availability of electricity as a variable they must constantly monitor. Reliability gives people something that is rarely included in discussions about infrastructure: confidence. And confidence is one of the foundations of economic activity, education, creativity, and community life.

So, when the lights go out in Iloilo, I hope we stop asking only when they will come back. I hope we also ask what the interruption tells us about the city we are building and the infrastructure supporting the future we keep promising ourselves. I hope we remember that resilience should never become an excuse for unreliable systems, because people deserve more than praise for surviving conditions that can and should be improved. A city becomes genuinely modern not when it teaches its people how to live with uncertainty, but when its infrastructure gives them enough reliability to imagine tomorrow without fear that the lights will suddenly go out.

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Noel Galon de Leon is a writer and educator at the University of the Philippines Visayas. He teaches in the Division of Professional Education and at UP High School in Iloilo. He currently serves as faculty-in-charge of the UP Visayas Language Program Office and as secretary of the National Committee on Literary Arts of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA). His poetry has been recognized by the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature.