The Department of Energy has forecasted that the Visayas may still experience yellow and red alerts in the summer of 2025 due to increasing power demand in the region.
Energy Undersecretary Rowena Cristina Guevara said that next summer will be much better than this year but noted that the Visayas may still experience power alerts.
“We can see that 2025 summer will be much better than 2024 but with special attention to the Visayas”, Guevara told the media at a Department of Energy Power 102 Workshop at the Bonifacio Global City in Taguig on Wednesday, July 10.
She reported that next year, the country will have another 4,000 megawatts of power, which includes 2,000MW from fossil fuel, and another 2,000MW from renewable energy.
This means there will be an 18 percent growth in the power generation supply in the country which can be available for the next three years.
However, Guevara explained that some areas in the Visayas may have potential congestion as the transmission development projects cannot keep up with the energy or generation demand.
A yellow alert is issued when the contingency reserve is less than the capacity of the largest synchronized generating unit of the grid, and a red alert is issued when the contingency reserve is zero which may lead to manual load dropping or rotating power interruptions.
Meanwhile, a blue alert is issued by the system operator when a tropical disturbance is expected to make landfall.
In April the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines issued a yellow alert in the whole Visayas after 13 power plants had forced outages.
Guevara said that they are still investigating the cause and await the report from the agency’s technical team.
“Red and Yellow alerts are just alerts, but it doesn’t mean there will be a brownout”, she said.*