CERA flags NGCP over grid outages

As recurring power outages and rotational brownouts continue to disrupt households, businesses and critical services across the Visayas, the Cebu Electricity Rights Advocates (CERA) is urging policymakers and regulators to look beyond power supply shortages and address what it described as the growing weakness of the country’s transmission infrastructure.

CERA said recent grid disturbances in Luzon and the Visayas, including incidents recorded on Friday, show that energy reliability problems are increasingly linked not only to generation shortfalls but also to structural and operational vulnerabilities within the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) transmission network.

The group said transmission bottlenecks, limited grid redundancy, and failures involving major transmission assets have contributed to widespread outages and instability across the power system.

“We must recognize that many recent outages are increasingly linked to transmission vulnerabilities under NGCP,” said CERA convenor Nathaniel Chua.

“While public attention often focuses on reserve margins and power generation during peak demand periods, the stability of the grid is also heavily dependent on the reliability and resilience of the transmission backbone managed by NGCP,” he added.

CERA cited the May 2026 tripping of key 500-kilovolt NGCP transmission lines, particularly the Ilijan-Dasmariñas and Ilijan-Tayabas lines, which significantly limited the grid’s ability to transmit more than 1,300 megawatts of power.

The incident forced several distribution utilities to implement Automatic Load Dropping measures to prevent a wider grid collapse despite available generation capacity elsewhere in the system.