Rep. Javier Miguel “Javi” L. Benitez (Neg. Occ., 3rd District), together with 11 other Visayas representatives as principal authors, filed House Resolution No. 1430 directing the Committee on Energy to inquire, in aid of legislation, into what Visayas consumers paid for ancillary services this year and whether the reserves they paid for were delivered when the grid went under red alert.
The measure was filed by Benitez with Reps. Julienne L. Baronda (Iloilo City), Emilio Bernardino L. Yulo (5th District, Negros Occidental), Maria Vanessa C. Aumentado (2nd District, Bohol), Kristine Alexie B. Tutor (3rd District, Bohol), Junard Q. Chan (Lapu-Lapu City), Eduardo R. Rama, Jr. (2nd District, Cebu City), Kathryn Joyce F. Gorriceta, MD (2nd District, Iloilo), Anna Victoria Veloso-Tuazon (3rd District, Leyte), Carl Nicolas C. Cari (5th District, Leyte), Patricia C. Calderon (7th District, Cebu), and Daphne A. Lagon (6th District, Cebu) on Monday, July 7.
Ancillary services are the standby reserves NGCP buys to cover sudden plant outages and demand spikes. The cost is passed on to consumers in full, a press release from the Office of Benitez said.
For the July 2026 billing period, the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines reported that ancillary services rates rose from Php 0.7941 to Php 1.0391 per kilowatt-hour, or 30.85 percent, an increase carried into August bills. A household using 200 kilowatt-hours a month pays about Php 49 more for that step alone. NGCP put the rate at Php 0.7220 in May, which makes the climb about 44 percent in two months, it said.
Those are nationwide averages. NGCP bills ancillary services separately for Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao, and consumers have seen an ancillary services line on their bills since ERC Resolution No. 04, Series of 2026 took effect. The Visayas rate, its movement since January, and the list of who was paid are not on the bill.
Benitez wants all three on the record.
The charges were collected through a year of repeated grid alerts. Through September 3, the Visayas grid had logged 30 red alerts and 93 yellow alerts. On July 8, 1,092.8 megawatts were unavailable because of forced outages and deratings, and manual load dropping hit parts of Cebu, Mactan, Aklan, Antique, Bohol, Capiz, Guimaras, and Iloilo. On August 26, 938.9 megawatts were unavailable, with 32 plants on forced outage.
Red alerts returned on September 2, 3, and 4, with rotating interruptions in Cebu. Plant outages did most of the damage, compounded by limited imports from Mindanao.
NGCP has said it earns nothing from ancillary services and remits the money to generation companies under contract and to the Independent Electricity Market Operator of the Philippines (IEMOP) for reserves bought on the Reserve Market. Rep. Benitez said he accepts that. “If the money passed through NGCP, then somebody received it, and that somebody can be named,” he said.
The inquiry would require NGCP, the Energy Regulatory Commission, the Department of Energy, IEMOP, the distribution utilities and electric cooperatives of the Visayas, and the generation and ancillary services providers to produce the amounts charged to Visayas consumers month by month, the payments made to each provider, and the megawatts of reserve required, procured, available, scheduled, and dispatched during each red alert.
Benitez also wants to know whether penalties for failure to deliver scheduled reserves were imposed under the WESM Rules and the providers’ contracts.
The resolution asks for firm completion dates for the generation, storage, and transmission projects the Visayas is counting on, including the next stage of reinforcement for the Cebu-Negros-Panay corridor and the battery installations the DOE is lining up, along with the cause of any delay, the entity responsible, and the extent and causes of solar curtailment in Negros this year. The DOE expects new baseload plants in the Visayas from 2028, which leaves two more years of paying for reserves that have to work.
“Every centavo of this charge is passed on to the consumer, so every centavo has to be accounted for. We paid for reserves all year. The grid still went red thirty times. Somebody got paid for those days, and I want to know who and what they delivered. If reserves that were paid for were not delivered, the ERC should determine whether refunds or penalties are due,” Benitez said.
The ERC said in May that the summer crisis was poorly managed and that it would review reserve requirements and ancillary services procurement. In August, it ordered the correction of flawed line loss and congestion charges in the Visayas, with refunds expected. HR 1430 asks the Committee to recommend how the charges should be published and how delivery should be checked, and to ask the ERC whether any of the money should come back.
The resolution complements the inquiry into the broader Visayas supply crisis that Deputy Speaker Albee Benitez filed the same day before the Committee on Visayas Development. *
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