Power is costly. Without it is worse.

Power interruption is never just about lights going out. It is about an economy stopping without warning. Truth be told, when the grid trips, we do not just lose illumination, we are losing millions.

Honestly, we are getting the diagnosis completely wrong. We treat brownouts as a technical inconvenience, a one-hour rotation we can tolerate. However, tolerating it is economic suicide. Metro Cebu residents may experience one-hour rotational brownouts as the Visayas grid struggles with a power shortage caused by plant outages, reduced generation and limited imports from Mindanao. With NGCP posting at least 13 red-alert notices (some sources say, 20) for the Visayas grid in August alone, this is not normal. This is a system operating without margin. 

Yes, Cebu’s power grid is operating without a safety margin, turning what authorities dismiss as a technical inconvenience into an economic disaster. Visayan Electric has had to warn of tight supply leading to outages across critical areas, putting the economic engine of the province on a rotating off switch and prompting calls for an energy summit.

The root cause is a preventable pile-up of systemic failures rather than a single plant tripping. We have built a Visayas grid that is 70 percent dependent on coal, crippled by brittle transmission lines, inadequate ancillary reserves, and limited power imports from Mindanao. The situation worsened significantly when major coal-fired plants shut down, including the forced outages of Therma Visayas Inc. (TVI) Units 1 and 2, the emergency shutdown of Cebu Energy Development Corp. (CEDC) Unit 2, and delayed preventive maintenance, as reported by NGCP and DOE. In August alone, eight power plants were out of service—some since June and July—all compounded by a predictably high demand forecast.

This darkness brings an unequal and devastating financial toll. For a household, a power interruption or brownout means a child cannot study and meat in the ref spoils. That is P500 lost in one night. For companies, it is fatal. A furniture exporter running a kiln dryer loses an entire batch if power dies for an hour. A BPO in IT Park with 300 agents loses 300 man-hours per hour of interruption and pays service-level agreement (SLA) penalties in dollars. A cold storage operator loses P100,000 in thawed goods. Multiply that by thousands of MSMEs, which account for 96 percent of businesses in Central Visayas, losses are immensely huge.

Indeed, quantitatively, if Visayan Electric implements just one hour of Manual Load Dropping (MLD), 400,000 to 500,000 customers lose productive time simultaneously, costing Cebu several millions in foregone output per hour before counting equipment damage.  Qualitatively, however, it is far worse. This unreliability destroys investor confidence, resulting in capital flight as investors turn to regions or provinces that can guarantee continuous power for peaks.

To stop browning out our way to progress, we must execute decisive, transparent actions. For immediate relief, Visayan Electric must enforce radical transparency by publishing binding MLD schedules 24 hours in advance. More importantly, TVI units must be restored.

Permanently, the grid must pivot from coal-centric to reliability-centric power by fast-tracking LNG terminals. Furthermore, a deployment of 200-MW battery storage system (BESS) in Cebu is highly feasible and is in step with current regional energy strategies and should be a go. As it is exceptionally huge to be built in one place, deploying and distributing this volume across the island is definitely practical and achievable. Moreover, mandating rooftop solar panels for new industrial buildings should be seriously worked out. 

Finally, backed by private capital, we must demand strict accountability. Emergency power deals must be replaced with true competitive selection for ancillary services, and the Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) must mandate 30-day fuel and reserve audits with automatic penalties for extended forced outages. We need a live public dashboard detailing every generation outage and transmission tripping, complete with contractor names and restoration dates, backed by severe penalties, like lifetime blacklisting, for falsified maintenance reports. Power is not a commodity to ration; it is a right to deliver, and the entire energy sector must remember that its true business is keeping Cebu working without darkness. 

Indeed, while power is costly, without it is worse.