Visayas under yellow alert anew as Mindanao imports shrink

CEBU CITY, Philippines — Yellow alert, wherein power reserves can no longer meet demand, has been issued for the Visayas grid anew on Monday, August 10.

Aside from prolonged forced outages in some of the largest generators in the region, constrained power imports from Mindanao have also strained the power grid further.

The yellow alert will cover from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m., according to the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) in an advisory.

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Available capacity stood at 2,350 megawatts (MW) against a projected peak demand of 2,276MW during the alert window.

This leaves a razor-thin margin insufficient to cover the grid’s contingency requirement.

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NGCP attributed the alert to the continued unavailability of three of the region’s largest coal-fired units as well as lesser imports from Mindanao.

The Mindanao link has been squeezed by the extended outage of South Energy Corp.’s SEC 2 unit and a forced outage at GNPower Kauswagan’s GNPK 1, limiting the buffer Visayas can normally draw on when local supply tightens.

Plant outages

Five plants have been on forced outage since August alone, with two more sidelined since July, three since June, and seven since May, said NGCP.

This meant a cluster of five consecutive months of accumulating outages.

Beyond that, one plant has been down since March, three since 2025, two since 2024, two since 2023, and one unit has not returned to service since 2021. An additional 13 plants are running at derated capacities.

Combined, the outages and derations account for 909.8MW stripped from the grid, nearly 40 percent of Monday’s available capacity figure, NGCP added.

A yellow alert does not mean rotating brownouts are imminent, but it signals that the grid has little room to absorb an unexpected plant trip or demand spike during the affected hours without resorting to emergency measures.

NGCP has repeatedly flagged similar tight margins across the Visayas grid this year, with the pattern of outages spanning plants sidelined for months or, in at least one case, years, pointing to a persistent capacity shortfall rather than an isolated event.

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