Visayas: The continued forced outage of generating units at two major coal-fired power plants remains the main factor for the yellow alert status in the Visayas grid from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. Wednesday. The National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP), in an advisory, noted that the grid's available capacity is around 2,542 megawatts (MW), while peak demand is expected to reach 2,362 MW.
According to Philippines News Agency, the high demand in the grid results in an inadequate operating margin against the transmission grid's contingency requirement. This arises as units 1 and 2 of the Therma Visayas Inc. and unit 3 of the Panay Energy Development Corporation remain unavailable. These outages are compounded by the forced outages of several smaller power plants, such as hydro power plants, which are typically under regular maintenance during the summer months to take advantage of the lower water levels in dams.
The NGCP further reported that for this month alone, eight power plants are on forced outage. Additionally, eight other plants have been unavailable since May, one since March, three since 2025, two since 2024, two since 2023, and one since 2021. These outages have collectively reduced the grid's capacity by approximately 992.1 MW.
