Policy group Institute for Climate and Sustainable Cities said the rotating blackouts that hit Luzon and Visayas this week exposes a deeper structural weakness in the country’s power system that is heavily dependent on a small number of major power plants, shared fuel facilities and critical transmission corridors.
It said the outages showed how a single disruption could quickly cascade into a broader power supply crisis.
According to the ICSC, on May 14 the available capacity in Luzon fell sharply from the National Grid Corp. of the Philippines’ earlier forecast of 16,975 megawatts to just 12,447MW after key transmission lines and power plants simultaneously tripped.
The shutdown of the 500-kilovolt Dasmariñas-Ilijan line at 4:48 a.m. and the 500kV Tayabas-Ilijan line at 6:39 a.m. on Thursday disconnected nearly 2,500 MW from the grid, including the Ilijan 1 and 2 plants and EERI Units 1, 2, and 3, all of which are liquefied natural gas facilities.
The outages came as the NGCP placed Luzon and Visayas grids under red and yellow alerts on May 13, and again on May 14.
Visayas faced possible outages of up to 7 hours across 32 areas, while Luzon, including Metro Manila, experienced hour-long outages in 9 areas, marking the first back-to-back serious supply alerts in two years.
ICSC also noted that the same LNG plants suffered simultaneous shutdowns on April 16 due to problems involving the LNG terminal supplying their fuel, underscoring the risks of relying on shared infrastructure.
The group warned that no single facility should be capable of putting the entire grid at risk. “To break the cycle of grid alerts and rotating blackouts, the Philippines must move towards a more decentralized, diversified, and flexible power system,” it said.
It called for greater investment in renewable energy, battery storage, and fast-ramping capacity to reduce the risk of a single disruption rippling across the power system.
The country’s power system and infrastructure has long been easily overwhelmed by random disruptions, from unscheduled outages, natural disasters, fuel issues, and even jellyfish swarms, which is an indication of its lack of redundancy and vulnerability. When a minor incident can often quickly snowball into crisis levels, the system is obviously in sore need of improvements that can allow it to weather such threats. Energy officials have long known what is needed, but interim and kneejerk solutions are often outpaced by growing demand, which means that more often than not, we end up right where we started.
Every year, the country’s power system goes on red or yellow alert during the summer time, when demand is high and power plants struggle with the hot and dry weather. Everyone expects it, everyone knows that it is a weakness. How come the power sector has not yet done anything substantial about it?*
