Visayas grid under yellow alert on Oct. 17, 2026

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The Visayas power grid will be placed under yellow alert on Saturday afternoon to evening due to thin reserves resulting from the unavailability of several power plants.

In an advisory, the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) said the yellow alert will be hoisted over the islands cluster from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m.

The grid operator said the Visayas grid is currently operating at 2,511 megawatts (MW) capacity against a peak demand of 2,362 MW.

The NGCP cited the following factors that contributed to the yellow alert declaration in the Visayas grid:

• Unavailability of Visayas' large coal plants PEDC 3 and KSPC 1
• Planned maintenance schedule of Mindanao-Visayas interconnection Line 2

Moreover, it said that five plants are on forced outage in October, five plants since September, three plants since August, one plant since June, four plants since May, three plants since 2025, two plants since 2024, two plants since 2023, and one plant since 2021, while 16 plants are running on derated capacities.

The outages and derated capacities of dozens of plants resulted in a total of 662.4 MW unavailable to the Visayas grid.

A yellow alert is issued when the operating margin is insufficient to meet the transmission grid’s contingency requirement.

While supply is still enough to meet current demand, it no longer reaches the required safety margin.

At this level, the possibility of rotational power interruptions increases. —KG, GMA News