Boracay Power Outages in 2025 and 2026: What Happened, When and Why

Dates and times are as reported. The December 2025 entry gives no count or duration of the interruptions⁶.

The Philstar report of 12 May 2025 gives the clearest account. The 69 kV Nabas-Unidos-Caticlan line tripped at 9:48 p.m. on 4 May, and repairs finished at 3:57 p.m. on 5 May, when the National Electrification Administration said power was fully restored¹. Residents posted about the disruption online; one commenter quoted by Philstar said Boracay had been “experiencing brownouts almost every day”, a remark that no source counts or confirms¹.

This was the longer event. Power to Boracay, Malay and Buruanga was lost from 2:30 p.m. on 13 September, after the line tripped at 1:37 p.m.². Eight teams from NGCP and AKELCO built an 800-meter temporary overhead line along the airport runway, with clearance from the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines and security help from the police³. The Department of Tourism said the outage “threatens the reputation of Boracay as one of our premier tourist destinations”⁴.

Sources disagree Reports differ on when power returned and how long the outage was. Power Philippines and GMA give 2:55 p.m. on Monday, 15 September³¹⁰. A Power Philippines report on a statement by the Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry gives 12:53 p.m. as the time AKELCO energized all feeders covering Caticlan and Boracay substations⁴. Duration is “approximately 2 days” in the GMA report and a “three-day outage” in the Power Philippines headline, which counts the calendar days³¹⁰. Plan around two full days without grid power for an event of this kind.

The record points to the supply path rather than to demand on the island. The May trip was a broken wire on the mainland side¹. The September failure was in underground cable beside the airport². The December bypass failures and the early-2026 inspection both point to marine corrosion⁶⁷. NGCP’s 138 kV project is meant to add a second route; it was 93.161 percent complete in April 2026, and no source used here confirms it finished¹¹.

The 2026 grid events are a different cause. At a Senate briefing on 28 May 2026 a capacity shortage of 87 MW on Panay was reported, tied to a forced outage of a 150 MW unit¹². The July red alert and the August rotating brownouts were attributed to plants on forced outage and limited imports, and neither GMA report says that Boracay lost power⁸⁹. Whether Boracay had cuts on 8 July or 26 August is not stated in the sources used here.

What you may have heard Some accounts say Boracay has brownouts “almost every day”. The only source for that in this record is an online commenter quoted by Philstar in May 2025¹. No source used here counts brownouts across 2025 or 2026. The dated entries above are the events that news reports confirm.

AKELCO’s website carries a daily supply and demand outlook table, with megawatts of supply, maximum load demand and the deficit for morning, afternoon and evening. On 3 October 2026 it showed a deficit of 0.71 MW in the morning, 17.14 MW in the afternoon and 12.56 MW in the evening¹³. How often the table is updated is not stated, and the homepage has no dedicated section for interruption advisories¹³. NGCP’s Visayas grid alerts are reported by GMA when they are issued, as on 8 July 2026⁸. No crowd-sourced Boracay outage tracker was found.