Millions of Filipinos went without electricity last month, and a ranking senator now wants answers about why the country’s grid keeps slipping into warning territory.
Senate President pro tempore Sherwin Gatchalian has called for a formal investigation into the string of power interruptions that struck Luzon and the Visayas, along with the repeated red and yellow alerts flagged by the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP).
The push is contained in Senate Resolution 425. In the document, Gatchalian cited figures showing the Visayas grid logged roughly 22 interval hours under red alert and nearly 93 interval hours under yellow alert. The Luzon grid, he said, sat under red alert for 27 interval hours and yellow alert for about 5.5 interval hours.
He framed the timing as a warning sign. “Projections that the El Niño weather phenomenon may strengthen in the last 4 months of the year, up to January next year, could exacerbate the power-supply gap in the country,” Gatchalian said in a press release issued Saturday.
The senator laid out several aims for the inquiry: establishing the real state of the nation’s power supply, testing the reliability of the grid, pinning responsibility on stakeholders found at fault, and gauging whether generation firms are operating at top industry benchmarks. He is also pressing for workable government action and tighter enforcement of energy laws, including measures targeting the demand side.
The alert system itself carries specific triggers. Under NGCP definitions, a red alert signals that “power supply is insufficient to meet consumer demand and the transmission grid’s regulating requirement,” while a yellow alert applies when the “operating margin is insufficient to meet the transmission grid’s contingency requirement.” The grid operator has previously maintained that it can move power onto the country’s lines only when supply is actually there.
The disruptions in mid-May cut electricity to 2.1 million consumers for no less than three hours on May 13. Normal service across both grids was restored on May 16.
Lawmakers had already begun examining the breakdown before Gatchalian’s filing, with the House committees on energy and on legislative franchises holding their own investigation into the outages on May 13.
