Your brownout is a Cebu problem with an Iloilo address

Twenty thousand MORE Power customers lost electricity in a single day last week. Panay had the generation to serve them. It did not matter.

The Department of Energy’s own simulation, presented to the Iloilo Business Club, explains why. At evening peak Cebu demands 1,077 megawatts and can depend on 655. That 422-MW hole gets filled from Leyte-Samar, Bohol, and Mindanao, with Luzon backfilling Leyte. The Visayas as a whole carries a surplus of 126 MW, or 5.2 percent of demand. So when Therma Visayas 1 and 2 and KEPCO SPC’s Unit 1 all sat idle on Aug. 28, and 979.6 MW went missing, NGCP shed load wherever it could, including here.

The argument is simple. There is no rule that says Cebu, at 45 percent of Visayas demand and 26 percent of its capacity, must hold reserves near its own load. So nobody does. And the cost of that missing rule lands on distribution utilities hundreds of kilometers away, whose customers see only a dark feeder.

Manila has noticed. Energy Secretary Sharon Garin said in June that “Visayas is problematic,” and by late August the DOE was recommending suspension of certificates for some 40 generation companies after 203 show-cause orders. Useful. But a show-cause order does not generate a megawatt, and suspending a plant that is already offline punishes no one.

The honest part is this: Iloilo cannot pretend to be a victim only. On Jan. 2, 2024, Panay lost roughly 300 MW in two hours and went dark for three days, and it was the interconnected grid, the same one now dropping our load, that brought us back. Anyone in Iloilo talking about islanding Panay should read the ERC’s findings from that week first. The Cebu-Negros-Panay backbone cost PHP 43.41 billion, and we are paying for it in transmission charges precisely because we needed it.

Shrinking the grid won’t work. The real fix requires localized reserves, robust lines to handle plant failures, and three unavoidable expenses.

A located reserve requirement for the Visayas, set by the DOE and enforced by the ERC, which will show up in ancillary service charges on every Visayas bill, Iloilo’s included. Firming the Cebu-Leyte-Samar link beyond its 250-MW cap, which NGCP did not list among its seven 2026 completions and which consumers will repay through wheeling rates for decades. And the 250 MW of battery storage the DOE keeps promising, which someone has to buy at rates the ERC has yet to approve.

The Institute of Contemporary Economics puts Western Visayas output at risk from grid stress at PHP 72 billion to PHP 85 billion over five years. This might be more of a model, not a ledger, but the direction is right.

Against that, a few centavos per kilowatt-hour for reserves that actually exist is a bargain the Iloilo congressional delegation and the Regional Development Council should be demanding on the record.