THE Institute for Climate and Sustainable Cities (ICSC) is pushing for accelerated investment in rooftop solar, battery storage and other distributed energy resources as a more sustainable way to protect the grid from unplanned outages, after the Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) increased allowable outage days for power plants.
The group said expanding distributed renewables would reduce the system’s exposure to the failure of any single large power plant, a risk highlighted by 123 yellow and red alerts recorded in the Visayas alone since January.
Unlike large coal units whose sudden tripping removes a big block of supply, ICSC said distributed solar and storage systems are modular and do not threaten reserves when one unit goes offline. It added that rooftop solar can ease daytime demand, preserve reserves for evening peaks and limit reliance on expensive backup generation.
The proposal comes as the ERC, under Resolution 23, raised the allowable equivalent unplanned outage days for nearly all generation technologies covered under Resolution 10, Series of 2020. For pulverized coal, combined cycle and conventional hydro, the allowance nearly doubled.
The ERC said the revised thresholds were based on actual operating and outage data from 2015 to 2024. ICSC said while the decadelong data is valuable for diagnosis, it should not be used to set future benchmarks.
“A reliability standard should be built around what the grid, and the consumers who depend on it, need going forward, not around what plants have already delivered,” said Alberto Dalusung III, ICSC energy transition advisor. “When a single power plant fails, the impact is rarely confined to that plant alone.” Over the past year, the National Grid Corp. of the Philippines has issued repeated alerts across Luzon and the Visayas as large plants, particularly coal-fired units, went on unplanned outage. When a major unit trips during high demand, reserves are quickly depleted, more costly plants are dispatched and prices in the Wholesale Electricity Spot Market rise. Costs are ultimately passed on to consumers.
“When a major power plant gets offline, it can put the entire grid under pressure,” Dalusung said. “This makes it important for reliability standards to drive better plant performance and ensure that the system is better protected from unexpected outages, rather than simply accepting historical performance as the benchmark.” He added that the allowable outage limits should therefore be regularly reviewed and tightened as plant performance improves.
ICSC asked the ERC to treat the revised thresholds as a transitional standard, not a permanent one, and laid out five recommendations. It gave the following recommendations: progressive tightening of standards through periodic review as plant performance improves; use of outage data for diagnosis and corrective investment, not as justification for higher allowances; stronger public disclosure of outage performance with meaningful consequences for plants that repeatedly exceed limits; system-wide evaluation of how outages affect grid reserves, market prices and consumer costs; and parallel investment in grid diversification through distributed renewable energy.
The group said higher outage allowances could weaken incentives for generation companies to improve reliability at a time when Visayas and Mindanao need a more dependable and affordable power system. It warned that pairing stricter standards with a shift to renewables would better shield consumers from price volatility.