Visayas grid under red, yellow alerts on August 30, 2026 —NGCP

The Visayas grid will be placed under red and yellow alerts on Sunday, August 30 due to the unavailability of several power plants, the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) said.

In an advisory, the red alert will be hoisted from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.

The yellow alert on the other hand will be raised from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m., and 9 p.m. to 10 p.m.

The NGCP said that the grid only has an available capacity of 2,228 megawatts (MW) despite a peak demand of 2,306 megawatts.

The grid operator cited the following factors that contributed to the red and yellow alert declarations:

- Unavailability of Visayas' large coal plants TVI 1, TVI 2, PEDC 3
- Limited power import from Mindanao (further aggravated by the recent outages of TSI 2 and GNPK 1)

Further, the NGCP said that 10 plants are on forced outage on August 2026, one plant since July, three plants since June, seven plants since May, one plant since March, three plants since 2025, two plants since 2024, two plants since 2023, and one plant since 2021, while 15 plants are running on derated capacities.

The plants on outage and derated capacities resulted in a total of 977.2MW of capacity unavailable to the Visayas grid.

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

Meanwhile, a yellow alert is issued when the operating margin is insufficient to meet the transmission grid’s contingency requirement.

The Department of Energy earlier ordered the NGCP to install over 250 megawatts of battery energy storage system to address the thinning energy supply in the Visayas grid.

The energy storage power plants are located in four Visayas provinces: Iloilo, Negros, Cebu, and Leyte. —KG, GMA News