Lights on? or lights off?

That’s not one of the typical ‘fast talk’ questions being thrown by a country’s well-known television host, rather, that is a state of the country’s power supply that primarily distressed Filipino consumers in this year’s summer months.

In the third State of the Nation Address (SONA) of President Marcos, part of the business sector’s wish list will be for the government to really set in place the concrete solutions that will squarely address not just the wobbly electricity supply in the country, but also the expensive rates being passed to consumers.

Industry players generally assess that the Philippines is still very much on catch-up mode when it comes to ensuring reliable power supply, especially with projections that the economy will be growing at a scale of 6.0 to 6.6% annually.

At this point, the Department of Energy (DOE) indicated that Luzon grid, which is also the country’s main economic center, will be relatively safe next year from any anticipated affliction of ‘yellow’ and ‘red alerts’ – or that condition of insufficiency of power reserves that at times could plague consumers with rotational brownouts especially if the forced outages of power plants would go unabated.

Energy Undersecretary Rowena Cristina Guevara highlighted that Luzon grid will be in a better place in 2025, with the anticipated entry of roughly 4,000 megawatts until the end of this year.

She qualified that the capacity shoring up will be coming both from fossil fuel technologies – primarily from coal and gas-fed power facilities; and the rest will be coming from renewables.

“2024 was a special year because of El Niño, so that contributed to the high heat index during our summer. Fortunately, this year, we have 4,000MW of incoming power – 2,000 fossil and 2,000 from renewables,” she said.

In terms of generation, the gigawatt-hours (GWh) output of the new plants, according to the energy official, will be equivalent to 18% increase, hence, that is seen as major improvement in Luzon grid supply by next year.

“The growth of our economy is about 6.0 to 6.6%, so if our generation growth is 18%, then we will have three years of breathing space – that’s just for the developments this year because there would also be new capacities coming in next year,” Guevara stressed.

She added “we can see that 2025 summer will be much, much better than 2024 – but there shall be special attention to Visayas.”

Guevara particularly cited the case of Bohol, which has been showing 50% increase in demand due to the aggressive growth of its tourism sector.

And while the interconnected 138 kilovolt (kV) Leyte-Bohol line has been supporting Bohol’s capacity draw from plants in other parts of Visayas, any outage in that linked-up transmission facility could still render it sudden power service interruptions.

Nevertheless, the DOE is projecting that the carrying capacity of the Leyte-Bohol submarine cable could already be eased upon the completion of the 230kV Cebu-Bohol interconnection by the end of this year.