Visayas Grid on yellow alert anew on continued coal plant outages

The Visayas Grid will be placed under yellow alert status anew four hours starting Monday afternoon, due to the continued force outages of major coal plants in the region and the expected high system demand.

In an advisory, the NGCP said the Visayas Grid will be on yellow alert status — indicating that the operating margin is insufficient to meet the transmission grid’s contingency requirement — from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. on Monday.

This comes as the available capacity was recorded at 2,664 megawatts (MW) versus the peak demand of 2,483 MW as a total of 874.1 MW remains unavailable to the grid.

The NGCP attributed the yellow alert declaration to the higher system demand forecast, and the continued forced outages of Therma Visayas Inc. (TVI) 1 which has been out since May 12, 2026; TVI 2 since March 24, 2026; and Panay Energy Development Corp. (PEDC) unit 3 since May 6, 2026.

Energy Secretary Sharon Garin earlier this month already ordered the immediate the restoration of the three power plants, and instructed the Visayas Field Office to inspect and coordinate with the concerned generation companies to ensure that they are back online “safely and promptly.”

A total of 12 plans have been on forced outage since May 2026, one since March 2026, three since 2025, two since 2024, two since 2023, and one since 2021, while 13 plants are running on lessened capacities.

Last week, the Department of Energy (DOE) said that while there is no direct correlation between the declaration of yellow and red alerts on electricity rates, the thin power supply forced the use of more expensive diesel power plants, which could slightly raise power costs. — RSJ, GMA News