Visayas grid under yellow alert for third straight day in August
CEBU CITY, Philippines — The Visayas power grid remained under a yellow alert for a third consecutive day on Wednesday, August 5, as a backlog of forced power plant outages—some dating back to 2021—continued to reduce available capacity.
The National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) declared the yellow alert from 3 p.m. to 9 p.m. Wednesday, with available capacity at 2,431 megawatts against a peak demand forecast of 2,373MW.
The margin, once again, falls short of the buffer needed to withstand a sudden loss of a major power plant or transmission line.
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NGCP attributed Wednesday’s alert to the continued unavailability of five of the Visayas’ largest coal-fired plants, including the Toledo Power Corporation and Cebu Energy Development Corporation (CEDC), which recently underwent emergency shutdowns.
Forced outages
These outages are part of a far larger tally of idled capacity weighing on the grid.
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As of Wednesday, a total of 27 power plants across the Visayas remain on forced outage.
Five went offline this month, three since July, three since June, seven since May, one since March, three since 2025, two since 2024, two since 2023, and one plant that has not returned to service since 2021.
An additional 13 plants are running at derated, or reduced, capacity.
In total, NGCP said 1,081.5MW of generating capacity — enough to power hundreds of thousands of households — remains unavailable to the grid.
A yellow alert is declared when a grid’s operating margin is not enough to cover its contingency requirement, meaning the system has little to no cushion if a plant trips or a line fails.
It is one step below a red alert, which is declared when available capacity can no longer meet actual demand, typically triggering automatic load shedding.
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