Brace for brownouts on Aug. 13, red alert up for Visayas grid

CEBU CITY, Philippines — For the 6th time in a row, the Visayas grid was placed under red alert Thursday, Aug. 13, as available power capacity fell below forecast peak demand.

The National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP), in its 8 a.m. advisory, placed available capacity at 2,283 megawatts (MW) against a forecast peak demand of 2,360 MW, a 77-MW shortfall.

The grid was placed under red alert from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.

Yellow alerts were also declared from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. and 8 p.m. to 9 p.m.

NGCP attributed the alerts to the continued unavailability of three major coal-fired units in the Visayas as well as reduced power imports from Mindanao.

The reduced imports were partly due to a scheduled maintenance outage at GNPower Kauswagan (GNPK) 2 and an emergency shutdown of GNPK 1 following a boiler tube leak, NGCP said.

High forecast system demand also contributed to the tight supply situation.

The latest alert came as a growing number of generating units remain unavailable across the Visayas grid.

NGCP data showed 27 power plants on forced outage, with six going offline in August, two in July, three in June, seven in May, one in March, three in 2025, two in 2024, two in 2023 and one since 2021.

Another 13 plants were operating at derated capacities.

Together, the forced outages and derations have taken 903.2 MW out of the grid.

Restoring all of this capacity would be more than enough to cover Thursday’s projected 77-MW supply deficit.

READ: Red alert hits Visayas, Mindanao on August 10

A red alert is declared when available supply is insufficient to meet consumer demand and the regulating reserve required to maintain grid frequency.

A yellow alert is issued when the operating margin falls below the contingency reserve needed to absorb the sudden loss of the largest online generating unit without affecting customers.

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