Editor’s Note: This is Part 1 of a two-part series on connecting Catanduanes’ power grid to Luzon. Part 2 will appear next week.
Catandunganons may have taken heart a few days ago when Congressman Leo Rodriguez raised the prospect of connecting the province’s power grid to Luzon with an undersea cable.
But this is an old idea. For years, a proposal to connect Catanduanes Province to the national power grid through an undersea power cable has been discussed, studied, promised, and shelved — a familiar cycle for infrastructure plans.
Now, after the financial collapse of SUWECO — Sunwest Water and Electric Co., the island’s main power supplier — and weeks of rolling blackouts affecting more than 61,000 households, the long-deferred submarine cable proposal has acquired new life.
The Early Days
The idea of connecting Catanduanes to the mainland power grid via a submarine electric cable was formally proposed in Congress as early as 2019, when former governor and then Catanduanes Representative Hector Sanchez authored a House Bill seeking to authorize the construction of submarine cable lines linking Camarines Sur to the island. Sanchez, an electrical engineer by training, argued that the project would result in savings of up to ₱20 billion for the national government and Catandunganons, and would assure residents of zero blackouts and cheaper electricity.
The proposal gained traction when the national government began to take seriously the isolation of several island provinces from the Luzon Grid. At the time, only the Visayas Grid had intra-connections between islands through submarine cables. Catanduanes and other islands in the Luzon group were entirely cut off from the Luzon Grid, which covered all of Luzon, including Camarines Sur, but no outlying island provinces.
In April 2021, the proposal moved from paper to formal commitment. The National Transmission Corp., the government agency that owns the nation’s power transmission assets, and FICELCO — First Catanduanes Electric Corp., Inc., the firm that operates the local grid in Catanduanes — signed a memorandum of agreement for the construction and installation of 69-kilovolt sub-transmission submarine electric cable lines from Presentacion and Caramoan in Camarines Sur to just north of Brgy. Codon in San Andres, Catanduanes.
At that time, it seemed like an historic moment. Upon completion, it would have been the first connection between Luzon Island itself and an outlying island in the Luzon group.
Former TransCo President Melvin Matibag, now director the National Bureau of Investigation, declared that the project would “put an end to disputes among service providers and controversies related to the procurement of power supply” on the island.
The much-ballyhooed project also attracted attention beyond Catanduanes. By early 2022, TransCo had identified the Catanduanes interconnection as its top priority, and envisioned it as a model for similar undersea cable projects in Palawan and Mindoro.
A University of the Philippines energy expert consulting for TransCo declared: “Everything will start in Catanduanes.”
The Plan — and the Price Tag
By mid-2022, the project had evolved and a new lead actor had stepped forward — The National Grid Corp. of the Philippines.
NGCP is a privately owned corporation that in 2009 won a 25-year contract from the government to operate, maintain and develop the nation’s power grid.
After reviewing the plans for a submarine cable, NGCP sought approval from the Energy Regulatory Commission for a ₱9.5 billion Camarines Sur-Catanduanes Interconnection Project, which it said would be completed within 48 months of approval.
For context, ₱9.5 billion might seem like a lot of money, but it is not much when contrasted with some ₱200 billion earmarked for infrastructure projects and allegedly stolen by legislators and their cronies, as disclosed last year.
In any case, the ERC has not yet approved the Camarines Sur-Catanduanes Interconnection Project.
Its scope is nonetheless substantial. The submarine cable portion is a 23-kilometer, 69-kilovolt connection running from Brgy. Bitaogan in Presentacion, Camarines Sur, to Brgy. Asgad in San Andres, Catanduanes.
But the undersea cable is only part of the picture. The project also requires overhead transmission lines, a 70-kilometer 230-kilovolt Naga-Presentacion transmission line, and six 69-kilovolt substations — a reminder that connecting an island to a grid is not just about crossing the sea, but about building all the land infrastructure on both sides of that crossing.
NGCP noted that even by 2020, Catanduanes had a peak electricity demand of 15 megawatts while its total contracted supply stood at only 10.18 megawatts — meaning the island was already consuming more power than it could reliably generate with existing facilities, long before the current crisis.
What Went Wrong
Despite the signed agreements, the public announcements, and the regulatory filings, the cable was never built. The reasons are familiar: pandemic-related procurement delays, financing disputes within the government, right-of-way concerns along the Camarines Sur mainland corridor, and the slow grinding of the ERC’s approval process.
As early as December 2021, TransCo sought financing authority from the Department of Finance but was told not to use its own revenues for the project.
In the end, the funding question — who would pay for a ₱9.5 billion project in a province of just over 250,000 people — was never resolved. The project remained in a bureaucratic holding pattern as administrations changed and priorities shifted.
Today, however, SUWECO crisis has shattered any argument for delay.
Bryce McIntyre, PhD, resides in San Andres. He holds a doctoral degree from Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, USA.
Claude AI was employed in research for this article.