The Visayas power grid was placed under a yellow alert for the fourth consecutive week on Monday following the continued forced outages of major coal-fired power plants.
The National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) raised the yellow alert from 3 p.m. to 9 p.m. after available capacity stood at only 2,579 megawatts against a projected peak demand of 2,488 megawatts. The NGCP noted that a yellow alert is issued when the operating margin is insufficient to meet the transmission grid's contingency reserve requirements.
A total of 958.25 megawatts remains unavailable to the regional grid. Eleven power plants have been on forced outage since May, including major baseload providers such as Units 1 and 2 of Therma Visayas Inc., Unit 3 of Panay Energy Development Corp. and Unit 2 of KEPCO SPC Power Corp.
The NGCP reported that 11 other power plants are currently operating at derated capacities. Furthermore, several other plants have been offline for extended periods, including one that has been on a forced outage since 2021.
The persistent lack of supply comes as the Philippines experiences heightened electricity consumption during the hot and humid summer months.
In an official statement, the Department of Energy (DOE) said it is actively coordinating with the NGCP, the Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC), the Independent Electricity Market Operator of the Philippines and generation companies to expedite the safe restoration of the affected facilities. The agency assured the public that efforts are being accelerated to restore the offline units and stabilize the grid.
To address the recurring grid constraints, government energy regulators recently conducted spot inspections of the offline facilities in Cebu and Iloilo to verify their operational conditions and monitor the progress of corrective actions.
Moving forward, lawmakers, including Sen. Sherwin Gatchalian, have urged the ERC to launch a formal investigation into generation companies' compliance with government reliability standards to penalize erring plants and shield consumers from potential power rate shocks.