IN recent years, power supply emergencies such as those which Luzon and the Visayas experienced for three days last week (May 13-15) have provided "clean energy" and "just transition" activists with opportunities to spread a dangerously false narrative, to wit: The failure of conventional generation plants, especially coal, proves that renewable energy (RE) is more reliable. That is the basic argument, but it is sometimes augmented with claims that hastening the transition to full RE power will also help ease worsening climate impacts and the effects of the El Niño on the Philippines.
For example, on May 14 one of the usual suspects, the Philippine Movement for Climate Justice (PMCJ), released a statement via the group’s Facebook page blaming the power shortage in the Visayas the previous day on the unavailability of coal plants. The statement singled the Therma Visayas Inc. (TVI) plant in Toledo, Cebu, which had two units down (a total of 338 megawatts), and the 150-MW Unit 3 of the Panay Energy Development Corp. (PEDC) plant in Iloilo City, and also added a little class-warfare spice by noting that TVI is an affiliate of Aboitiz Power, and PEDC is affiliated with Meralco PowerGen Corp. (MGEN). The statement also highlighted that at the time of the issuance of a “red alert” on May 13, 21 other plants in the Visayas were offline, and 15 others were operating on derated capacity.
“Since most of these units are coal-fired power plants, the Philippine Movement for Climate Justice underscores that coal is not only polluting but also structurally unreliable, undermining grid stability,” the PMCJ said. “This unreliability calls into question the planned addition of two more coal units in Toledo by TVI and MGEN.”
That was a non sequitur, but the PMCJ doubled down with an even bigger one: “These developments strengthen the case for diversifying Cebu’s energy mix and accelerating the shift to renewables with battery storage, especially as 2026 follows two of the warmest years on record. In 2024, global temperatures breached 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial levels, intensifying climate risks.”
It continued, “With the looming threat of a ‘super El Niño,’ the Philippines — ranked the world’s most disaster-prone country by the World Risk Index 2025 — faces more extreme heat and heightened vulnerabilities. A rapid and just transition to renewable energy is necessary not only to secure energy supply and shield communities from external shocks, but also to advance climate justice for poor and vulnerable sectors who contribute the least to climate change yet suffer the most from its impacts.”
Cherry-picking
On May 13, there were two separate but connected problems happening. The bigger one, of course, was the tripping of two major transmission lines in Luzon, which isolated more than 2,000 MW of supply from the grid for a time. At the time, there were also a number of plants in Luzon offline; about 30 of them in total, with another 14 or 15 running on derated capacity. That meant that a bit more than 4,600 MW was at least temporarily unavailable to the grid, so that the grid operator, the National Grid Corp. of the Philippines (NGCP) did not have enough supply to tap to make up for the amount that was isolated by the tripped lines. That also meant that there was not enough supply to export from the Luzon grid to the Visayas grid to make up for the supply deficit there, which was the second problem.
However, attributing the failure to that alone in order to advance the “RE is more reliable than dirty and unreliable coal power” is, at best, cherry-picking facts. First of all, it is not unusual for a number of power plants to be offline or running at reduced capacity for one reason or another. It is true that sometimes those reasons are the fault of the plant operator, something unplanned due to poor maintenance or mistakes in procedures; but more often, it is either due to management of grid stability, or regular maintenance, both things that are completely normal and managed in the complex dance that keeps power flowing.
The 850 MW that was unavailable to the Visayas grid early on May 13 was indeed a bigger than ideal deficit, but not a catastrophic one, and could be compensated if necessary by importing power from either Luzon or Mindanao. The surplus available from Mindanao is not large, and is constrained a bit by limitations of the Mindanao-Visayas interconnection, but is still useful. Luzon has a very large surplus, even with a couple of dozen generation plants offline, enough that it could probably power the entire Visayas grid but for the constraints on its interconnection. It was only the big line trip in Luzon that made that surplus unavailable, thus aggravating the Visayas supply deficit.
It was a wild card event, in other words; even the best-maintained transmission system will experience occasional failures from external causes, and to impute some failure of performance to NGCP (as Energy Secretary Sharon Garin was quick to do, because she’s had a bone in her craw about NGCP since even before joining the DOE) is unfair. Likewise, assigning NGCP part of the blame for plants being unavailable is unfair; the grid operator doesn’t create the electrons, it only moves them around, and if there are not enough available for everyone, there is really nothing it can do about that. It tracked down the line fault and had both lines back in service within a few hours, and carried out the time-consuming process of resynchronizing power plants to the grid as quickly as possible, which was as much as Sharon or anyone else could ask.
As for the assertion that “reliable” RE would have prevented the crisis, that is simply wrong. What RE power is already available undoubtedly helped to ameliorate the crisis, but at the level of development of RE generation in the country now, it would not be useful for recovery from partial blackout caused by a grid fault, primarily because it is difficult to synchronize to the grid, and has little “grid-forming” capability.
Technology is definitely moving to overcome those hurdles, but even in parts of the world with very well-developed RE infrastructure, it hasn’t gotten there yet; one good example of that is the massive blackout that occurred on the Iberian peninsula in Europe last year. Here in the Philippines, successfully carrying out a “rapid” transition to RE while still ensuring an acceptably stable system is realistically 10-15 years away, and to suggest otherwise is simply wrong.
ben.kritz@manilatimes.net
Bluesky: @benkritz.bsky.social
Website: www.badmannersgunclub.com
