As the generation companies (GenCos) miserably faltered with their relentless forced outages during the summer months, President Marcos has profoundly cheered the P160 billion worth of completed transmission projects of system operator National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) in his third State of the Nation Address (NGCP) on Monday.

The President’s lyrical commendation on NGCP’s achievements had been a major reversal of the often-demonized treatment accorded by the Executive and Legislative Branches of government to the transmission firm for several years.

The NGCP projects which reached commercial operations and headlined in the President’s SONA had been the P51 billion Mindanao-Visayas Interconnection Project (MVIP); the P20.94 billion Hermosa-San Jose transmission facility; P67.98 billion Cebu-Negros-Panay (CNP) interconnection; as well as the P19.61 billion Cebu-Bohol transmission link-up project which is due for completion this year.

The inauguration of the 500kV Mariveles-Hermosa-San Jose transmission backbone project of NGCP.

These transmission projects were pushed in the past administration and reached completion in the current government leadership, despite delayed cost recovery approvals by the Energy Regulatory Commission.

This year’s summer months also came as a stark realization to the energy officials and the overly-mothered power generation firms that the real trouble and the ‘weak link’ in the country’s precarious power supply had been the recurring forced outages of power plants, as NGCP had already done its share in fully contracting reserve requirements.

In a statement to the media, NGCP noted that “the mention of the Mariveles-Hermosa-San Jose 500kV line, Cebu-Negros-Panay 230kV backbone, the Mindanao-Visayas interconnection and the Cebu-Bohol Interconnection project in the SONA is a clear sign that our hard work is recognized as having made a positive impact and is fully aligned with his vision for a strong economy.”

The transmission firm added “NGCP is ready to serve. With this, attention can now be properly trained at ensuring enough investments in the generation sector to meet increasing demand.”

With many transmission projects still at their varying stages of implementation, NGCP thus pleaded that “as we are all working towards ensuring the reliability of the country’s transmission network for a more resilient power industry, we reiterate our call for a more coordinated, resource adequacy based, and holistic approach to energy planning that considers the three main links to the energy supply chain:  supply, bulk transmission, and retail distribution.”

For the MVIP, in particular, the interconnected line’s carrying capacity of 400 megawatts will enable the sharing of power supply across grids – primarily the surplus capacity from Mindanao that can already be wheeled into the energy-starving Visayas and Luzon grids.

More importantly, that particular submarine cable-enabled link-up had concretized the long-term dream of the country to have a nationally-connected power grid.

The CNP interconnected facility, on the other, had been one of the most awaited projects to reach commercial stream, because that has not only eased the transport of capacity across islands in the Visayas grid, it also ushered in the injection of additional capacity from the solar power plants in Negros, which for years had experienced curtailments due to constraint in transmission capacity.

In the Luzon grid, the Hermosa-San Jose transmission line serves as a major backbone that will underpin the transport of capacity from existing and forthcoming power plants with its massive carrying load of 8,000 megawatts; while the Cebu-Bohol interconnection is seen primarily supporting demand growth in the tourist hub of Bohol.

Nevertheless, NGCP’s to-do list in upgrading and expanding the country’s power transmission network would still be vast – primarily in building the necessary infrastructure that will address the variability of massive scale renewable energy (RE) installations, which is the core of the country’s energy transition agenda.