Visayas grid under yellow alert on Aug. 19, 2026

The Visayas power grid will be placed under yellow alert on Wednesday afternoon to evening due to thin reserves resulting from the unavailability of several power plants.

In an advisory, the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) said the yellow alert will be hoisted over the islands cluster from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m.

The grid operator said the Visayas grid is currently operating at 2,481 megawatts (MW) capacity against a peak demand of 2,428 MW.

The NGCP cited the following factors that contributed to the yellow alert declaration in the Visayas grid:

• Unavailability of Visayas' large coal plants TVI 1 and TVI 2
• Limited power import from Mindanao (primarily due to the outages of coal plants and high system demand of Mindanao)

Moreover, it said, 11 plants are on forced outage in 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 12 plants are running on derated capacities.

The outages and derated capacities of dozens of plants resulted in a total of 826.5 MW unavailable to the Visayas grid.

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

While supply is still enough to meet current demand, it no longer reaches the required safety margin.

At this level, the possibility of rotational power interruptions increases. —KG, GMA News