Speaker Faustino “Bojie” G. Dy III and Senior Deputy Speaker Ferdinand “Dinand” Hernandez filed a resolution on Monday calling for a House investigation into the series of power line tripping incidents under the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) that resulted in widespread brownouts in Luzon and Visayas.
Under House Resolution No. 1024, the House leaders seek a legislative inquiry regarding the tripping of the 500-kilovolt Tayabas-Ilijan and Dasmariñas-Ilijan transmission lines on May 13, 2026. The incident caused the sudden loss of over 2,462 megawatts of electricity and placed the country under red and yellow alerts. Due to the massive disruption, NGCP implemented Manual Load Dropping, or rotational brownouts, affecting nearly 3.9 million consumers in Metro Manila, Batangas, Bulacan, Cavite, Laguna, and Rizal.
Speaker Dy stated that it is unacceptable for millions of Filipinos to lose power due to the failure of the transmission system. He emphasized that electricity is not a luxury but a basic necessity that directly impacts livelihoods, businesses, education, and daily life.
The resolution aims to determine whether the incident was caused by force majeure or by NGCP’s failure to fund and maintain the integrity of the national transmission system. Issues have also emerged regarding weaknesses in maintenance, protection systems, and compliance with the “N-1” contingency requirement. Speaker Dy also questioned why NGCP failed to report the incident to the Department of Energy (DOE) and the Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC).
Dy stressed that it is the duty of Congress to ensure that private companies with legislative franchises fulfill their obligations to the public. The investigation will focus on the technical cause of the outage, possible violations of NGCP’s reportorial compliance, the status of the Transmission Development Plan, and whether repeated failures warrant a possible breach of the corporation’s franchise.
