Manila: The red alert status for the Visayas grid and the yellow alert status for the Mindanao grid continued on Friday as several power plants remain unavailable and current capacity is inadequate to meet demand.

According to Philippines News Agency, Visayas is on red alert from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. and on yellow alert from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. and from 9 p.m. to 10 p.m., as announced by the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) in an advisory. The available capacity in the Visayas is around 2,269 megawatts (MW), while peak demand is projected to reach 2,511 MW. This situation arises because the generating units of the major coal-fired plant, Units 1 and 2 of Therma Visayas Inc. (TVI), are still on forced outage.

Electricity imports from Mindanao are also low due to the maintenance shutdown of GNPower Kauswagan's Unit 2 in Lanao del Norte and the emergency shutdown of its Unit 1 because of a boiler tube leak. The NGCP reported that 10 power plants in the Visayas are on forced outage this month, with around 20 having been out of service since 2021. These generating units are in addition to the 14 power plants operating at derated capacity, resulting in a total loss to the grid of approximately 829MW.

In the Mindanao grid, available capacity is about 2,800MW, while peak demand is expected to reach 2,619MW. The NGCP noted that 13 plants are on forced outage for August alone, with 13 others having been unavailable since 2024, and eight others operating at derated capacities. The total capacity loss to the grid is approximately 661.4MW.

The grid operator issues a yellow alert when the operating margin is insufficient to meet the transmission grid's contingency requirement, while a red alert is declared when the supply is inadequate to meet both the demand and the grid's regulating requirement.