FIRING LINE: Most expensive power in Southeast Asia

FIRING LINE: Most expensive power in Southeast Asia

By Robert B. Roque Jr. | July 23, 2026

There must be a reckoning for a government that lets its people burn the most expensive electricity in Southeast Asia while it hands out warnings instead of consequences.

June’s numbers are already a scandal: P12.43 per kilowatt-hour, the highest among SEA nations, edging out even Singapore by P0.09.

Looking back, groups like Power for People Coalition have long warned that heavy reliance on imported coal and gas would eventually crush ordinary households, and we’re seeing it here, right now.

Given that there was a red alert in May, look around, and you’d read about power generation plants tripping in the Visayas. This forced Meralco’s hand to purchase emergency load from the power spot market at nine pesos a kilowatt-hour just to keep our lights on.

Of course, there was the Middle East war that drove the fuel crunch abroad, and the doomsday tale for non-oil-producing nations like ours goes on. We have a power grid too fragile, a government too slow, and that leaves an overworked and overburdened public paying for both.

I would like to be fair to Malacañang and mention that President Junior did issue Executive Order 110, declaring a national energy emergency. But whatever did that do other than sound off a warning?

The Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) was told to investigate the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP). President Marcos himself ordered full transparency and accountability across the energy sector after the May grid failures plunged millions of consumers into emergency alerts.

Secretary Sharon Garin demanded answers on whether these recurring collapses were mere technical failures — or symptoms of years of neglected maintenance, delayed transmission projects, and broken commitments.

But before expecting government to take full control of the energy situation, let this refresh our memories: The NGCP isn’t merely the Filipino corporation that it once was. Forty percent of it now belongs to the State Grid Corporation of China — a wholly state-owned enterprise of Beijing.

I mean, with Chinese vessels still harassing our naval forces in Second Thomas Shoal a few days ago out in the West Philippine Sea, that foreign stake inside the country’s most critical power infrastructure feels ever more suspicious, doesn’t it? It inevitably raises uncomfortable questions.

Secretary Garin, for her part, fired off show-cause orders to 175 power generators over their outages and repeated failures to deliver committed capacity. But that only led to an embarrassing result: more than 120 companies simply ignored her.

Meralco and NGCP will point to their own numbers — a wheeling rate that dropped, a transmission uptick blamed on ancillary charges paid to generators. Perhaps true. But 88 percent of every bill is pass-through, and pass-through only works if somebody upstream is actually held to account. Nobody has been, and I have elementary knowledge of how the entire sector works.

But what’s plain and clear to me, as it is to most Filipinos dreading the cost of electricity, is that the Marcos leadership has failed repeatedly to get a grip on the country’s energy sector.

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