Red alert remains for Visayas grid, another day of brownouts

CEBU CITY — Households and businesses in Metro Cebu brace for another round of rotational power interruptions on Tuesday, Aug. 18, as the Visayas grid remained under a red alert for the ninth time already.

In its 8 a.m. advisory, the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) placed the Visayas grid on red alert from 3 p.m. to 9 p.m., meaning available power supply will not be enough to meet consumer demand and maintain the grid’s required safety margin during those hours.

A yellow alert, signaling a thinner-than-ideal buffer against unexpected plant trips, will also be in effect from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. and again from 9 p.m. to 10 p.m.

The grid operator projected available capacity of only 2,410 megawatts (MW) against a peak demand of 2,502MW, leaving a deficit of roughly 92MW during the critical hours, a shortfall that translates directly into scheduled power cuts for electric cooperatives and distribution utilities across Cebu and the rest of the Visayas, including Cebu City, Mandaue, Lapu-Lapu, and surrounding towns that draw from the regional grid.

NGCP attributed the persistent shortage to a wide swath of idled and underperforming power plants.

As of the Aug. 18 update, eight plants remain on forced outage this month alone, on top of one plant down since July, three since June, seven since May, one since March, three since 2025, two since 2024, two since 2023, and one plant that has been offline since 2021.

An additional 13 plants are running at derated, or reduced, capacities.

Altogether, NGCP said 836.9MW of generating capacity is currently unavailable to the Visayas grid.

Limited power imports from Mindanao have also further strained the grid supply.

Mindanao’s capacity to send power to the Visayas has been constrained by its own coal plant outages and elevated demand on its home grid, cutting off what would normally be a supplementary source of supply during Visayas shortfalls.

In the meantime, NGCP reiterated that a red alert does not necessarily mean an immediate, grid-wide blackout, but rather signals that operators must draw down reserves and may need to shed load to protect the grid from a wider collapse.

A yellow alert, meanwhile, leaves little room to absorb a sudden plant trip or demand spike without triggering deeper cuts.

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