PH Solar & Electricity News — Week of September 7, 2026
TL;DR
Energy Secretary Sharon Garin says she is working to fix the Visayas and Mindanao supply problem before Christmas, after NGCP logged 93 yellow and 30 red alerts in the Visayas so far this year. The fix is 170 MW of batteries across Cebu, Negros and Panay plus two diesel power barges due within September. Meanwhile MTerra Solar Phase 1 declared commercial operations with 950 MWac of solar and an 825 MW battery, and ACEN lent its own units more than P9 billion for a 500 MW battery and a 300 MW solar project in Zambales. Everything this week is about storage. Added 10 September: August spot prices in the Visayas and Mindanao hit 20-year records near ₱20 per kWh and will land on September bills, while Luzon fell 34 percent.
Policy
DOE targets a brownout-free Christmas after 30 Visayas red alerts this year
Energy Secretary Sharon Garin said she is working to fix the Visayas and Mindanao supply problem before Christmas. NGCP has logged 93 yellow and 30 red alerts in the Visayas so far this year, and 10 yellow and 3 red in Mindanao. The near-term fix is 170 MW of battery storage across Cebu, Negros and Panay, a 20 MW modular diesel set, and two power barges due within September.
What this means
Read what the fix actually is before planning around the promise. 170 MW of batteries and two diesel barges is a patch on a supply gap, not a rebuilt grid, and Garin herself puts the new baseload plants at 2028 to 2030. Her nearer target is more modest than the headline: the department hopes to eliminate red alerts and cut yellow ones to a minimum by October. Thirty red alerts in nine months is the number to hold onto. If your household cannot take an evening without power, that is a decision to make on your own roof, not on a timeline.
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Grid
Visayas back on red alert Monday with 818.9 MW out of service
NGCP put the Visayas grid on red alert from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. on Monday, with yellow alerts from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. About 818.9 MW of capacity was unavailable through forced outages and reduced output at several plants. On Saturday the grid ran red from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m., with 2,255 MW available against 2,432 MW of demand.
What this means
Worth noting what changed. The red alert window has narrowed from seven hours on 1 September to three on Saturday to a single hour on Monday, which is the first sign in six weeks that the situation is easing rather than deepening. The window has not moved, though. It still sits in the early evening, after rooftop output has gone and while everyone is home. Panels do not touch that hour. A battery sized for one to three hours does, and that is a much cheaper pack than one sized for a whole night.
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Market
MTerra Solar Phase 1 goes commercial with 950 MWac and an 825 MW battery
Meralco PowerGen declared commercial operations for phase one of its ₱200-billion MTerra Solar project on 26 August, after NGCP certified 950 MWac of solar and an 825 MW battery for connection. The full build is a 3,500 MWp solar farm with 4,500 MWh of storage, which MGEN says will be the largest integrated solar project in the world on completion.
What this means
This is the counterexample to something we wrote a fortnight ago. Looking at the Iloilo project financed in August, we noted its 80 MWh against 166 MWp was roughly half a megawatt-hour per megawatt-peak, a smoothing battery rather than an overnight one. MTerra runs 4,500 MWh against 3,500 MWp, about 1.29, so nearly three times the storage per unit of panel. Utility-scale storage in this country is being built deeper than it was, and the reason is the same one you face at home: the demand that matters arrives after the sun has gone.
Market
ACEN lends its own units over ₱9 billion for a 500 MW battery and 300 MW of solar
ACEN extended up to ₱6 billion to Sanmar Solar for a solar park with 500 MW of battery storage in San Marcelino, Zambales, and up to ₱3.24 billion to Giga Ace 8 for the 300 MW Palauig 2 project, part of a ₱16-billion park that will be its second largest. Both sit behind a DOE rule requiring solar and wind developers to include storage so output can be held back and released at peak demand.
What this means
That DOE rule is the quiet story of the week. Regulators have concluded that solar without storage does not solve the problem the country actually has, and every new farm now ships with a battery attached. The same arithmetic applies on a roof, just smaller. Panels cut the daytime bill because you stop buying at the retail rate. They do nothing for the evening peak or an outage. If you have been treating a battery as the optional extra, the grid operators have already stopped treating it that way.
Rates
Visayas and Mindanao spot prices hit 20-year records near ₱20 per kWh
IEMOP data shows August spot prices reaching ₱19.56 per kWh in Mindanao, up 88.2 percent from ₱10.39 in July, and a record ₱18.59 in the Visayas, up 64.9 percent. The system-wide WESM average rose 11.8 percent to ₱9.29. IEMOP trading head Isidro Cacho Jr. called them the highest since the market opened in 2006, blaming simultaneous forced outages at major coal plants. They land on September bills.
What this means
Look at what Luzon did in the same month: spot prices fell 34.2 percent to ₱4.80 per kWh as demand dropped 10.4 percent. So Mindanao paid four times what Luzon paid for the same commodity in the same country in the same August. Generation is more than half of a bill, so if you are in the Visayas or Mindanao, September is going to hurt, and it is the same coal outages driving the red alerts in the item above. If you are on Meralco, this is the rare month where the spot market is working in your favour.
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