PH Solar & Electricity News — Week of September 28, 2026
TL;DR
The Visayas had 2,572 MW available against 2,374 MW of demand on 28 September and still went to yellow alert, because a 198 MW margin is not a reserve. The same three coal units are still down, and Therma Visayas 1 is now thirteen days past the return date the DOE published for it. The pipeline is finally reading the problem correctly: of 137 projects endorsed for grid impact studies in the first half, 85 were battery storage. The ERC approved a ten-year supply deal for La Union at ₱5.9684 per kWh, which is worth holding next to the ₱14.74 you actually pay and to what your exported solar earns. Oakridge and First Gen added 1.053 MWp of rooftop across two Mandaue commercial sites. In Palawan, generation costs over ₱30 per kWh in places while households pay about ₱13.
Grid
Visayas has a 198 MW surplus and goes on alert anyway
NGCP put the Visayas grid on yellow alert from 5 to 7 p.m. on 28 September. Available capacity was 2,572 MW against 2,374 MW of peak demand. The same three coal units went down at 4:34 a.m. — Panay Energy Development 3, KEPCO SPC 2 and Therma Visayas 1. Across the grid, 33 plants are on forced outage and 15 more are running derated, for 928.3 MW unavailable.
What this means
A surplus of 198 MW on 2,374 MW of demand is about 8%, and that is why an evening with more supply than demand still triggers an alert: the margin is thinner than the largest unit that could trip. Two things in that outage list are worth reading slowly. Therma Visayas 1 had a DOE-published return date of 15 September and was still out on the 28th, thirteen days late — the same slip we flagged last week at nine days. And the forced-outage roster includes plants down since 2021, 2023, 2024 and 2025, which is not a maintenance backlog, it is capacity that exists on paper. The alert window has not moved all month: 5 to 7 p.m., after rooftop output has stopped. Panels do nothing for that window. A battery sized for those two hours is a small pack, and much cheaper than one sized for a whole night.
Grid
Of 137 projects queued for grid studies, 85 are batteries
The DOE endorsed 137 power projects totalling 17.8 GW to NGCP for system impact studies between January and June 2026. Battery energy storage accounted for 85 of them. Wind made up 18, solar paired with storage 16, hydro 8, biomass 3, waste-to-energy 1, and fossil generation 6 — three coal, two diesel and one gas.
What this means
This is the first number in months that says the industry has understood the problem. Sixty-two percent of the queue by project count is storage, and every solar project in it is paired with a battery rather than standing alone. That is the market pricing the evening peak the alerts keep landing in. Two cautions before anyone waits for it. A system impact study is the start of the queue, not the end — ACEN dropped 456 MW of announced solar two weeks ago over land it could not buy, long after the same paperwork stage. And NGCP was explicit that generation and transmission planning have to move together or the capacity strands. The lesson for a household is the smaller version of the same insight: the panels are not the part that covers your evening.
Rates
ERC approves a ten-year supply deal at ₱5.9684 per kWh
The ERC granted provisional authority for ACEN to supply La Union Electric Co., which serves 21 municipalities and one city in La Union plus one town in Pangasinan. The deal runs ten years from 26 September at a winning bid of ₱5.9684 per kWh, for 46.23 to 62.42 MW in year one rising to 64.39 to 97.38 MW by year ten. Supply comes from two Islasol solar plants and a 269.96 MW coal unit.
What this means
Keep that ₱5.9684 somewhere you can find it. It is the generation cost of electricity bought at wholesale on a ten-year contract, and it sits against the ₱14.7424 per kWh a Meralco household pays all-in this month. The gap is not profiteering, it is transmission, distribution, system loss, subsidies and taxes — roughly ₱8.77 of your rate is everything that happens after the power is made. It also brackets what your own exported solar is worth. Under net metering you are credited at generation cost, around ₱5 to ₱7, not at the retail rate, which is exactly why a system sized to be used as it is generated beats a system sized to export.
Market
Oakridge and First Gen put 1.053 MWp of rooftop on two Mandaue sites
Oakridge Realty Development and First Gen signed on 23 September to add rooftop solar across two Cebu commercial developments: 648 kWp at Mantlewood Town Center and 405 kWp at Oakridge Business Park, which already runs on renewable supply through the same partnership. Neither company published output or savings figures.
What this means
Two details make this more than a press release. It is rooftop rather than a field, on buildings that already exist, in a region that spent September on grid alerts — the kind of self-supply that reduces demand in the window the alerts keep hitting. And First Gen framed it as managing "volatility in power costs" rather than as a green gesture, which is the honest reason commercial solar gets signed off. The same logic scales down without much loss: a business paying commercial rates and running its load in daylight has the strongest case for solar of anyone, better than most households, because consumption and generation already line up.
Policy
Palawan generation costs over ₱30 per kWh while households pay about ₱13
The DOE published a Palawan masterplan targeting 274 MW of new capacity by 2030, more than 155 MW of it wind, solar and hydro, plus over 1,000 circuit-kilometres of new 69 kV line and 18 switching stations. Energy Secretary Sharon Garin said generation there leans on diesel and bunker fuel. Transmission work is due to start in December 2026 and finish by end-2027.
What this means
The figure to take away is the spread: generation costs above ₱30 per kWh in parts of Palawan against roughly ₱13 paid by residential consumers, with subsidy covering the difference. That gap is the real economics of off-grid and weak-grid provinces, and it is why solar plus storage pencils out there at sizes that would be hard to justify in Metro Manila. It also sets the clock. The transmission backbone is a single north-to-south line today and the rebuild finishes at the end of 2027 at the earliest, so anyone in Palawan weighing a hybrid system is deciding against at least another year of the current grid, not the promised one.