Visayas, Mindanao grids under red, yellow alert on Sept. 9, 2026

The Visayas and Mindanao grids will be placed under yellow alert on Wednesday, September 9, due to the unavailability of some coal plants, the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) said.

In an advisory, the red alert will be declared on the Visayas grid from 1 p.m. to 10 p.m.

The yellow alert in the Visayas grid, on the other hand, will take place from 10 p.m. to 11 p.m.

For the Mindanao grid, the yellow alert status will take effect from 1 p.m. to 9 p.m.

The NGCP said the Visayas grid only has an available capacity of 2,124 megawatts (MW) amid a peak demand of 2,555 MW.

The grid operator cited the unavailability of Visayas’ large coal plants Therma Visayas Inc. (TVI) Unit 1 and Panay Energy and Development Corporation Unit 3.

There was also an outage of TVI Unit 2 earlier in the day and limited power import from the Mindanao grid.

Moreover, 11 plants are on forced outage in September, four plants since August, one plant since July, two plants since June, seven plants since May, three plants since 2025, two plants since 2024, two plants since 2023, and one plant since 2021. There are also 13 plants are running on derated capacities, for a total of 982.6 MW unavailable to the grid.

For Mindanao, the declaration of the yellow alert was due to the unavailability of Mindanao's large coal plants, the GNPower Kauswagan Ltd. Co. 2 and 3.

Moreover, the NGCP said 13 plants are on forced outage on September, seven plants since August, four plants since July, one plant since June, two plants since January, one plant since 2025, and one plant since 2024. Meanwhile, six other plants have been running on derated capacities.

The plants on outage and derated capacities resulted in a total of 769.7 MW of capacity unavailable to the Mindanao grid.

A red alert status is issued when power supply is insufficient to meet consumer demand and the transmission grid’s regulating requirement.

A yellow alert is issued when the operating margin is insufficient to meet the transmission grid's contingency requirement. — VDV/ VAL, GMA News