What It Means
- The DOE has acknowledged planning lapses behind missing baseload, but NGCP data shows the Visayas power supply is being cut first by idle plants and thin reserves.
- NGCP reported 928.3 MW unavailable to the grid against a peak demand of 2,374 MW on September 28, while the DOE’s 2028 baseload pipeline for Cebu-Bohol and Panay-Negros totals 285 MW.
- Even with interventions completed by 2027, the DOE’s best case still projects at least one red alert and 19 yellow alerts, so operators without onsite backup keep carrying the interruption cost.
- Pricing power moves to generators that stay online and storage developers that connect first.
- Reserve rules and battery connection, not the auction calendar, set how quickly the exposure shrinks.
Energy Secretary Sharon Garin told a House hearing in Bacolod City on October 3 that the Visayas has gone a long time without new baseload capacity, and she put it down to the planning side. The admission is real, but it explains the long-term shortfall better than it explains this year’s alerts. The Visayas power supply is being cut short today by idle plants and by a reserve design that fits an island grid badly, and plants scheduled for 2028 fix neither.
The Admission Is a Timeline, Not a Remedy
Garin hedged. Her wording was that it was, she supposed, the planning side. The word failure came from Rep. Antonio Tinio of ACT Teachers, who used it at the hearing, and from the headlines that followed. Writing that the DOE admitted failure puts words in the secretary’s mouth.
The distinction matters because the DOE’s position is a schedule, not a confession. The DOE formed teams last year to run simulations covering ten years, and the energy auctions follow from those runs. Operators should read that as a timeline. Neither the simulations nor the auctions add a megawatt to the Visayas power supply until a plant reaches commercial operation, and the DOE’s own pipeline puts new baseload at 150 MW in Cebu-Bohol and 135 MW in Panay-Negros in 2028.
The admission buys the DOE credibility on planning. It buys operators nothing before 2028.
Visayas power supply is short because built plants are idle
On September 28, NGCP reported 2,572 MW of available capacity against a peak demand of 2,374 MW, and the grid still went under yellow alert. That is a margin of about 198 MW, and it fell short of the contingency requirement. Three large coal units, at Panay Energy Development, KEPCO SPC Power and Therma Visayas, had shut down at 4:34 that morning. NGCP counted 14 plants on forced outage during September, with others out since earlier months, and 15 more running on derated capacity. In total, 928.3 MW was unavailable to the grid.
The scale of the pattern shows in the year’s count. By September 7, NGCP data showed the Visayas grid had logged 96 yellow alerts and 33 red alerts since January. Alerts at that frequency are not what one missing plant produces. They point to a fleet that cannot hold its reserve through a normal run of forced outages, which makes this a maintenance and reserve problem before it is a construction problem.
Measured against that day’s peak, the unavailable capacity equals about 39 percent of demand. That figure is our calculation from NGCP’s numbers. It is also more than three times the 285 MW of baseload the DOE expects in those two island groups in 2028. Capacity that is already built and sitting idle is a bigger swing than any single new-build item on the DOE’s schedule.
The DOE’s own account points the same way. On September 22, Garin said the alerts in the Visayas and Mindanao come largely from operational problems at several plants, and that repairs on some generating units were not done properly. On October 3, she said the recent red alerts followed simultaneous forced outages at six plants, with two Mindanao plants breaking down on top of that. Idle capacity, not absent capacity, is what is cutting the Visayas power supply today.
The DOE has also promised stronger oversight of plants and the grid operator, which it describes as long overdue. A regulator using that language about the plants it oversees is a regulatory shift on its own. Generators with weak maintenance records now face scrutiny that the old reading of the problem never applied to them.
Reserve Rules Built for Luzon Fit the Visayas Badly
Garin told the hearing that the reserve system works in Luzon and Mindanao but not the same way in the Visayas, because the Visayas is a set of islands. Lawmakers asked whether reserves had been too thin to prevent rotational brownouts, and the DOE agreed that the ancillary services plan and its guidelines need review.
Tinio also raised the practice of tapping primary generation plants as ancillary service providers. Garin said the DOE allows it for now and is moving to disallow it.
Read plainly, a plant counted as supply and also counted as reserve cannot cover both when it trips. That is our reading of the exchange, since the DOE has not published how many megawatts are involved. If the reading holds, the reserve margin that looks adequate on paper is smaller than the margin available during an outage.
Reserve rules sit between installed capacity and usable Visayas power supply. They are also the part of the system the DOE has said it will revisit, with no date reported.
Three Fixes Run on Three Different Clocks
The DOE is facilitating 253 MW of battery storage across Cebu, Panay, Leyte and Negros. The reasoning is that batteries can store excess daytime solar power and release it during the evening peak. Batteries move energy from the day to the evening. They do not replace a coal unit that stays offline for weeks.
Garin’s own claim for the batteries is narrower than a cure. On September 7 she said the 253 MW would remove more than half of the alerts, and that red alerts might be avoided as long as the batteries consistently come online. On October 3 the DOE’s best case, with interventions completed by 2027, still projected at least one red alert and 19 yellow alerts. The two statements are compatible, and together they describe a grid that stays on alert footing for years. The reporting does not say what period the October figures cover.
The batteries also depend on the grid operator. In August, Garin said the DOE had waited two months for NGCP to act on the batteries and that NGCP was not matching the DOE’s speed. A fix that runs through a counterparty the regulator has questioned in public carries its own delivery risk.
| Fix | What it addresses | Timing per DOE | Who gains | Who stays exposed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reserve rule revision | How reserves are counted and who supplies them | DOE agreed to review, no date reported | Providers of dedicated reserve | Plants that lose the dual role |
| Battery storage, 253 MW planned | Evening peak and thin reserves | Medium term, with NGCP installation delays | Storage developers and solar owners | Operators until the batteries connect |
| New baseload | Long-run capacity | From 2028, with 285 MW in Cebu-Bohol and Panay-Negros | Developers that win supply contracts | Every operator until commercial operation |
Before 2028, only restored units and batteries add to Visayas power supply. The reserve rewrite decides how much of that addition counts.
Operators Carry the Interim Risk Until Reserves and Batteries Connect
Nothing in the DOE statements or NGCP notices says which businesses absorb the outages. What follows is our reading. Cold chain, manufacturing, BPO and hospitality operators in Cebu, Panay and Negros, with loads that cannot be interrupted, pay in generator fuel, lost shifts and delayed expansion each time an alert turns into rotational brownouts. Operators in the Visayas pay for every shortfall in Visayas power supply directly.
A red alert means supply is short of both demand and the regulating requirement. Operators who treat alerts as an occasional inconvenience are pricing a risk that had already occurred 33 times by early September.
Imports from neighbouring grids do not close the difference. On September 22, NGCP said imports from Mindanao were low, which further limited the capacity available in the Visayas. NGCP also reports that imports from Luzon help ease the deficit but have not removed it. The backstop is itself thin.
Expansion and site decisions that assumed grid reliability now carry a cost the DOE has no near-term schedule to remove. Firm Visayas power supply becomes the scarce product, and the sellers of it, whether plants that stay online or storage developers that connect first, hold the pricing power.
Capacity that is already built and idle is larger than any new plant on the DOE’s schedule. Visayas power supply stays thin until reserve rules change and batteries connect, and Visayas operators carry the difference in generator fuel, lost shifts and postponed expansion. The reserve rulebook moves before the auction calendar does.
More developments that reshape the operating environment in National Signal section of Hemos PH.
