The Department of Energy (DOE) is coordinating an emergency overhaul of Palawan’s fragile power infrastructure after a system-wide blackout cut electricity in the tourist-heavy island province last week.

State agencies—including the National Power Corp. (NPC), National Transmission Corp., National Electrification Administration, and local distributor Palawan Electric Cooperative—are forming a joint task force to step up structural upgrades and mitigate future grid failures, the DOE said in a statement on Monday, May 25.

The coordinated intervention follows a May 22 system collapse that plunged the Palawan Main Grid into total darkness for nearly 13 hours. An initial probe by the NPC the state-run owner of the island’s transmission assets, revealed that a severely corroded section of its Irawan–Aborlan 69-kilovolt transmission line failed at 9:22 a.m. in Puerto Princesa City.

The structural failure triggered a cascading outage that disrupted electricity services across a 240-kilometer stretch from the municipality of Bataraza in the south to Taytay in the north.

NPC technicians isolated the damaged facilities and executed a "blackstart" recovery protocol using DMCI Power Corp.’s Expansion Man 2 Power Plant. Power was restored progressively to core municipalities, including Brooke’s Point, Narra, and Roxas, before electricity was fully returned to Puerto Princesa City at 10:06 p.m.

The DOE noted that while NPC engineers had already earmarked the deteriorated transmission segment for replacement under its deferred maintenance program, the infrastructure failed before scheduled rehabilitation could begin. Palawan operates as an isolated small-island grid, leaving it highly vulnerable to single-point-of-failure incidents on its singular transmission backbone. (Gabriell Christel Galang)