El Niño, the dry season and the alerts of April 2024

On 16 and 17 April 2024 the Luzon and Visayas grids were placed on red alert, with yellow alerts on the days around them, and some areas saw rotating cuts. Peak demand set a record in the same week. An El Niño that had been building since the middle of 2023 had reduced the water behind the hydro dams; forced outages had taken several large thermal units off line; and the heat had pushed demand past the previous year's peak.

Compiled in September 2026 from the releases of the time, with the revisions the agencies have published since. Nothing here is a forecast.

The three causes

Hydro. The country's dams, in Luzon and above all in Mindanao, produce least when demand is highest, and a dry year makes the gap wider. El Niño years are the grid's hard years.

Outages. Coal and gas plants built in the 1990s and 2000s trip more often as they age, and the dry season is when they are run hardest.

Demand. Cooling load grows with the temperature. The peak arrived earlier and higher than the operator's forecast.

What the market did

Spot prices went to the cap in the affected hours, and the average for April was the highest in years. The regulator's price caps limited what a consumer paid; the generators that could run were paid for it. The plants that were not on the grid had nothing to do with any of it.

The pattern

This was the second dry season in a row with red alerts, and the third in five years. The grid has enough energy over a year and not enough capacity on a hot afternoon in April or May, and each auction round adds midday solar that helps and evening reserve that does not. A site should plan on the alerts recurring.

What that means for a plant

A site that needs steam and power through the afternoon in the dry season has to decide whether an hour without them is acceptable. For most processes it is not, and the plant that makes its own steam and power from a residue it already has is the one that did not read about April 2024 in the newspaper.

If your site runs a fuel-fired boiler or produces an organic residue, an energy and waste audit puts your own numbers against this. Tell us about your site and an engineer replies with the data we need. The figures behind each quarter are in the quarterly market brief.