Visayas grid faces 1st red alert in July

CEBU CITY, Philippines — Consumers and residents in Cebu should brace for potential rotational brownouts on Wednesday, July 8.

The Visayas power grid was placed under red alert Wednesday afternoon after a transmission line fault and an emergency plant shutdown pushed available capacity below peak demand, the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) said.

The red alert took effect at 3 p.m. and is expected to last until 9 p.m., NGCP said in an advisory issued at 2:50 p.m.

READ: Visayas power grid placed under yellow alert again on July 7

Yellow alerts were earlier declared for the hours immediately before and after, from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. and again from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m.

As of the advisory, available capacity stood at 2,397 megawatts against peak demand of 2,492 MW, leaving the grid short by 95 MW.

READ: DOE to closely monitor Visayas power situation, vows measures

NGCP attributed the red alert to two developments Wednesday afternoon.

The Iloilo-PEDC 138-kilovolt Line 3 tripped at 1:32 p.m., which isolated Panay Energy Development Corp.’s Unit 3, and the emergency shutdown of the Palm Concepcion Power Corporation (PCPC) plant at 2:06 p.m. due to a suspected boiler tube leak.

READ: DOE backs ‘energy emergency’ declaration in Cebu amid strained Visayas grid

A red alert is declared when power supply is insufficient to meet consumer demand and the grid’s regulating requirement, the reserve needed to keep frequency stable.

A yellow alert, a less severe classification, is issued when the grid’s operating margin falls short of its contingency requirement, meaning reserves are thin but demand is still being met.

The shortfall also reflected a wider strain on Visayas generation capacity.

NGCP data show 31 power plants currently on forced outage across the grid: 10 that went offline this month, four since June, seven since May, one since March, three dating to 2025, three to 2024, two to 2023 and one plant that has been down since 2021.

An additional 14 plants are running at derated, or reduced, capacity.

In total, 1,092.8 MW of generating capacity is unavailable to the grid— more than enough, if restored, to erase Wednesday’s deficit several times over.

The prolonged nature of several outages, including plants down for multiple years, has drawn attention to aging infrastructure across the Visayas fleet.

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