An international climate and energy policy group has called for an immediate reassessment of Panay Island’s energy mix and grid resilience measures in the wake of the island-wide power outage earlier this month.

The Energy Policy Team of the Institute for Climate and Sustainable Cities, or ICSC, said on Thursday that actions were needed to diversify the island’s energy portfolio.

These could include exploring advanced energy storage technologies, enhancing grid interconnections, and strategically integrating renewable energy sources, it said.

“The Panay Island blackouts underscore the urgent need for more distributed and flexible generation in the country. Since the island is heavily dependent on a few centralized coal-fired power plants, any disturbance can have disastrous effects on the entire sub-grid,” the ICSC analysis read.

Further, it noted that generation and grid planning should integrate more distributed sources to ensure grid stability, reducing reliance on a few power plants.

“A diversified mix of energy sources, including renewables and other distributed technologies, can contribute to a more robust and reliable energy infrastructure, leading to more affordable, reliable, and secure power for Filipinos,” the group said.

The overall capacity of the existing power plants on Panay Island is 780 megawatts, distributed across coal (454MW), diesel (263MW), and renewable energy sources, particularly solar (5.7MW), wind (36MW), run-of-the-river hydropower (8.1MW), and biomass (15MW).

Considering this breakdown, ICSC said these capacities of renewable energy plants are “very limited while diesel power plants are only used for peaking purposes.”

However, in a recent interview, Monalisa Dimalanta, chairperson and CEO of the Energy Regulatory Commission, or ERC, expressed regret that the country’s power mix diversification has been put on hold because the national grid is not robust enough to adapt to alterations.

“Our system operates on a central dispatch function. There should be protection systems; these are actual equipment that are installed on the power plants’ side to protect the integrity of the grid because NGCP’s main function is to protect the integrity of the grid,” Dimalanta said.

Residents of Panay, the Philippines’ sixth largest island covering the provinces of Aklan, Antique, Capiz, and Iloilo, and parts of Guimaras, experienced large-scale blackouts from 2 to 5 January caused by the tripping of major coal-fired power plants.

Local governments and business groups on Panay and Guimaras islands have called for an investigation, demanding accountability from the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines, the Department of Energy, and the ERC to address the incident.

At the Senate energy committee hearing on 10 January, Iloilo City Mayor Jerry Treñas said the four-day blackout resulted in an estimated P2 billion in economic losses.