The country’s power supply mess is getting uglier by the day, particularly in the Visayas. Perhaps President Marcos’ “mahiya naman kayo” verbal fireworks now need to be directed squarely at Department of Energy (DOE) officials. While millions of distressed Filipinos endure tight supply and punishing electricity rates, the agency still appears to be searching for the switch—even for much-needed short-term fixes.

The DOE’s planning pendulum has been swinging wildly in all directions: from going all-in on renewables to chasing nuclear, hydrogen, and other emerging technologies. But while the agency pursues the next big thing, Energy Secretary Sharon Garin’s planning agenda appears dangerously detached from the immediate, practical fixes required to ensure the Marcos administration does not leave behind a legacy of power crises.

Last week’s fresh string of red alerts in the Visayas grid was another ominous escalation in a worsening power squeeze. That comes on top of more than two months of yellow alerts—marking the industry’s longest sustained period of strained power supply warnings.

It is hard to ignore how a DOE staffed with seven undersecretaries (or eight until one retired in June) and a phalanx of assistant secretaries can still stumble on the primary job explicitly handed to them by the Electric Power Industry Reform Act (EPIRA): efficient planning for the country’s energy sector.

What makes the situation even more alarming is that these red and yellow alerts are hitting the grid during the rainy season, which is normally a period of lower demand, and at a time when economic growth has slowed to a six-month low of 2.6 percent.

If the economy finally shifts into high gear and sustains rapid growth in the coming years, the question will be plain and unforgiving: where is the electricity backbone to carry it, or will the economy race forward only to slam into a wall of power shortages built by this administration’s planning failures?

The country’s interconnected grids should have served as a safety net, with the Visayas grid drawing power from Luzon and Mindanao. However, with several plants offline, even that lifeline is fraying. To date, Mindanao’s surplus is nearly exhausted, while the Luzon grid is hardly flush with reserves.

Recent alert declarations by system operator National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) have been both prescriptive and revealing. As of last weekend, 10 plants were on forced outage. Worse, three generating units have been offline since 2025, two since 2024, two since 2023, and one since 2021. These can no longer be dismissed as isolated breakdowns to be downplayed; they constitute a mounting outage backlog—a slow-burning threat steadily eating away at the country’s energy security.

Why is the DOE conspicuously quiet on these prolonged, simultaneous forced outages that strip the grid of much-needed capacity, yet quick to raise hell over a 9.5-MW plant in off-grid Siquijor that triggered service interruptions last year? Industry veterans viewed that episode as wildly overblown, sarcastically joking that given the marginal scale of the problem, the crisis could have been solved with a generator set ordered from Temu.

The Visayas grid may be the immediate battleground, but the consequences will not remain isolated there; this is growing into a national danger signal. Tight supply threatens not only system reliability, but also risks igniting price surges in the Wholesale Electricity Spot Market (WESM)—with the financial shock landing where it hurts most: on consumers’ monthly bills.

If EPIRA could speak on its recent 25th anniversary, celebrated by the DOE, it might have skipped the ceremonial speeches and simply said: “Hold my purse—I need to slap someone who still can’t get energy planning right after all these years!”

In simple terms, a yellow alert means the power system is walking a tightrope with virtually no reliability buffer. There is enough capacity to meet immediate demand, but precious little reserve to absorb another plant failure. A red alert occurs when that narrow ledge crumbles: available supply can no longer cover demand plus required reserves, leaving the grid dangerously exposed to blackouts if another generating unit trips offline.

The real menace behind yellow and red alerts is not the warning color itself, but the fundamental weakness beneath it: a power system running on razor-thin margins where every forced outage, supply shortfall, or sudden demand spike worsens the strain on both supply reliability and rates.

Generation remains the major flashpoint. That is precisely where stronger DOE oversight and discipline are urgently required to curb forced outages, protect supply, and prevent avoidable costs from landing on soaring electric bills.

Beyond chronic and seemingly unchecked forced outages, the country’s power crisis represents a perfect storm of vulnerabilities: aging infrastructure, insufficient firm baseload capacity, a lack of energy storage or flexible generation for when variable renewables suddenly drop off, weak grid integration for renewable energy projects, and transmission expansion that continues to lag due to uncoordinated planning. The picture increasingly resembles a ship without a capable captain at the helm to steer the industry toward energy security.

A resilient grid needs enough reserve margin to absorb a hard hit from sudden plant or transmission failures. To be clear, experiencing one or two yellow alerts on an exceptionally hot day is not a reason to panic. The legitimate cause for concern is repetition: when yellow and red alerts become a recurring feature, they stop looking like isolated events and start exposing structural weaknesses that demand urgent government intervention.

While there is no universal formula for an ideal reserve margin, well-run electricity markets around the world strive for a 20 percent to 30 percent cushion as a reasonable benchmark for reliable power operation. A grid running with barely any breathing room is not lean or efficient—it is a precarious gamble, and consumers are forced to pay when that risky bet goes wrong.

At this make-or-break moment, the DOE should be leading from the front and pushing concrete solutions onto the table. Sadly, the agency appears to have misplaced both its sense of urgency and its resolve to crack the whip on players that fail to deliver.

While the debate over scrapping system loss charges rages on, the Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) is opening another front: putting the fuel costs passed on to consumers by power generators under the regulatory microscope.

The audit will cover the six billing months from Jan. 1 to June 30, 2026, zeroing in on how fuel costs escalated at the height of the Middle East crisis and whether those increases were fully justified.

The ERC specifically drew the audit line around this period because it represents the window when generation costs recorded their steepest increases, ultimately driving up consumer electricity bills.

As ERC Chairperson Francis Juan emphasized: “Concentrating the audit on this six-month window allows the Commission to test the specific price spike of concern while keeping the exercise tightly scoped and fast to complete.”

In particular, the ERC will place generation companies' (GenCos) fuel charges under a forensic lens: verifying whether every peso was computed strictly under approved formulas, adhered to contractual caps or collars, and reflected actual fuel expenses rather than unauthorized markups or disguised non-fuel charges.

The ERC’s ultimate objective is to determine whether GenCos over-recovered or under-recovered fuel costs. If the audit uncovers excess collections, those amounts must be refunded to customers via monthly electric bills.

To put it bluntly, while consumer frustration over soaring bills remains at a fever pitch, concrete audit action by the ERC is critically important—not only to uncover potential financial relief, but to restore confidence that every charge passed on has a defensible basis.

The ERC is demonstrating that leadership is not a popularity contest. The regulatory body is showing that real work ranges from immediate relief to long-term structural reforms, including rate resets that may invite criticism and consumer backlash when decisions are rendered in the months ahead. Someone has to take the heat today so the power sector has a fighting chance tomorrow.

Hopefully, strategic policy direction will finally show up at the DOE’s doorstep. With less than two years left in the Marcos administration, top officials must step up and get serious about power planning. Because if we are being brutally honest, the agency today seems to have plenty of plans, but far too little effective planning—and very little competent leadership to show for it.