The Visayas is not a rounding error

Ambot sa imo! Another red alert in the Visayas. If you live in Manila, it is easy to scroll past. Your lights are on. How quickly “the country is fine” can come to mean “my part of the country is fine.”

For families in the Visayas, the alert itself is already a disruption. They charge their phones, check the freezer, and wonder whether dinner and homework will have to happen in the dark. Even if the lights stay on, they spend the evening waiting to find out.

The grid is the network that carries power from plants to communities. A yellow alert means there is too little power in reserve if something goes wrong. A red alert means supply cannot meet demand and keep the system stable, so some areas may face rotating brownouts.

On Thursday, September 24, the Visayas faced a red alert from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. Three major coal-fired units were unavailable, and emergency repairs to a transmission line stopped electricity coming in from Luzon. Available supply was below expected peak demand.

This was hardly a one-night scare. In a resolution seeking an inquiry, Bacolod lawmaker Alfredo Abelardo Benitez cited at least 93 yellow alerts and 30 red alerts in the Visayas from the start of the year through September 3. Those figures do not mean 123 blackouts. They mean families have repeatedly had to plan their evenings around the possibility of one. Yet from somewhere the lights stay on, those warnings can still sound like somebody else’s problem.

That habit of looking from where we stand had a counterpart in the price rules. Until this month, regulators used a nationwide average to decide when to cap unusually high wholesale electricity prices. Luzon’s lower prices pulled that average down. The cap did not kick in even as prices in the Visayas and Mindanao surged. The regions’ costs were counted; their crisis was lost in the math.

Wholesale prices are what power suppliers pay when they buy electricity in the market. A price cap is meant to stop sustained spikes from running away. The old trigger looked at the country’s average rather than the price in each region. Imagine being told your fever is nothing to worry about because someone else’s temperature is normal. Luzon’s lower prices were real. So were the higher prices elsewhere. The mistake was believing their average described everyone’s experience.

To a sari-sari store owner in Cebu, a power alert means worrying about stock in the fridge. To a parent in Iloilo, it means urging a child to finish homework while there is still light. These are two failures landing on the same doorstep: the risk of losing power, and a price safeguard that did not respond when wholesale electricity got expensive. You cannot run a home or a business on a national average.

This matters to Manila, too. Central Visayas accounted for 5.7 percent of Philippine output in 2025, while Western Visayas was the country’s fastest-growing region. When shops close early, workers lose hours and businesses hesitate to invest, a national economy loses the contribution of places it cannot afford to neglect. The price safeguard was national, too. If it could overlook two regions at once, a reassuring average was no proof that Filipinos were protected. We had mistaken a national number for a national experience.

Regulators have now changed the rule so prices in the Visayas and Mindanao are measured separately. That is what a safeguard should do: respond to a price spike where people are actually facing it. The change corrects the calculation. It should also correct the way we talk about the country—as if a problem becomes national only when it arrives in Luzon.

The change applies back to the August 2026 billing period. The market operator was directed to recalculate the wholesale charges, and local distributors were told to reflect the corrected figures in consumers’ bills. According to the Department of Energy, the change could lower the Visayas’ average August wholesale spot price from ₱18.59 to ₱8.47 per kilowatt-hour. That is a market estimate, not a promise that a family’s total bill will fall by the same amount.

Some distributors buy more power through long-term contracts; others are more exposed to the spot market. A useful answer would name each distributor, show the corrected amount it pays, and state how and when that difference will appear for its customers. People should not need to decode a market settlement to learn whether they saved anything.

Meanwhile, the Department of Energy says it is working to restore generating units, inspect repeated plant failures, address transmission constraints and deploy 253 megawatts of battery storage across the Visayas. Batteries can respond quickly when a plant trips. But plans for new generating capacity in parts of the region stretch into 2028 and beyond. Families living with alerts now need to know what is available now: which plants have returned, how much backup can be called on, and which transmission repairs remain unfinished.

Visayan lawmakers have taken the outages and reserve-power charges to Congress. Benitez has asked where the ₱1.04 per kilowatt-hour he cited for backup power goes, which generators were paid, and how many megawatts were actually secured. That is a better starting point than another promise to study the problem. A consumer can understand a receipt: this is what was charged, this is what was bought, and this is what was available when the grid ran short.

Three questions deserve public answers:

1. When will the unavailable power plants return to service?

2. How much reserve power did consumers pay for, and was it delivered when needed?

3. How much will the new price rule actually lower bills for each distributor’s customers?

People need the plants repaired, backup power they can count on, and any price relief reflected in their bills. We also need to stop using “regional” as a reason to look away. A crisis does not have to reach Manila to count as a national failure.

Ambot sa imo! A national average cannot light a home, keep a neighborhood shop open, or pay a family’s bill.

The Visayas should not have to go dark to be seen. And the rest of us should not need a brownout on our own street before we learn to look.