April 22 is globally observed as Earth Day.
Today, as the world pauses to reflect on what we are leaving behind for future generations, Mindoro, an island province in the western Philippines, is living through a crisis that makes the question both urgent and deeply local.
The province has been in or near a power emergency for most of April, with confirmed Red Alert declarations running from mid-month through April 20. On April 20, the grid ran nearly seven megawatts short during the afternoon peak. Oriental Mindoro Electric Cooperative (ORMECO) has issued repeated advisories warning of brownouts from eleven in the morning to ten at night. Fuel stocks at diesel plants ran dry, and generation costs surged by nearly 18 percent in April alone.
This is happening during one of the hottest periods of the year. The Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (PAGASA) has recorded danger-level heat indices reaching 42 degrees Celsius in parts of Mindoro this April, levels at which prolonged exposure risks heat cramps, exhaustion, and heat stroke. Mindoreños are enduring dangerous heat with no electricity to run a fan.
This is not a new story. Every summer, the same cycle returns: thin reserves, brownout rotations, emergency advisories. We have come to treat it as a seasonal inconvenience rather than what it actually is: a symptom of a fundamentally broken energy system.
The root of the problem is dependence. Mindoro’s grid relies heavily on diesel and bunker fuel plants, sources that are expensive by nature and doubly so now, as the Middle East conflict drives global oil prices upward. When fuel prices spike, electricity costs in isolated grids like ours spike with them.
Some will point out that renewable energy also faltered during this crisis. This is true, and it deserves an honest answer. The problem was not renewable energy. The problem was a grid never designed around diversification. A resilient energy system harnesses a diversified mix of solar, wind, hydro, and storage sources that cover each other’s gaps.
“Pandang Gitab ng Mindoro” (Guiding light of Mindoro), a scoping study by the Center for Energy, Ecology, and Development (CEED) published last year, estimated that Mindoro holds a potential of over 34 gigawatts in solar and wind capacity alone, hundreds of times more than the island’s projected peak demand. We are sitting on an abundance of clean energy while paying some of the highest electricity rates among off-grid areas in Luzon. That is not misfortune. That is a policy failure.
This is not merely a technical debate. It is, above all, a matter of justice. Who bears the burden? It is the tricycle driver whose earnings shrink when fuel costs climb. It is the small business owner for whom every unplanned outage is a day’s revenue lost. Electricity is not a luxury. It is the baseline of a dignified life, and too many Mindoreños are being denied it.
The response to this injustice is already being built from the ground up. In remote Mangyan communities, solar systems supported by civil society partners are providing reliable electricity to families that the main grid never reached. As part of the 75th anniversary of the Diocese of Calapan, which covers the whole of Oriental Mindoro, Bishop Moises Cuevas has called for the solarization of parishes, schools, and Church institutions throughout the province, a direct response to Laudato Si’. Even ORMECO is developing a 15-megawatt solar power plant in Bansud, projected for 2027. But meeting the minimum requirements of the law is only a beginning. What Mindoro needs is genuine institutional commitment to a full transition.
“REnew Mindoro,” led by the Diocese together with CEED and local organizations, is mobilizing investments to accelerate this transition. The REnew Mindoro Investments Summit on April 30 and the REnew Mindoro Fair on May 1–3 at Xentro Mall, Calapan are the next steps.
But on this Earth Day, the question before us is not whether Mindoro can transition to clean energy. The question is whether we will allow the same fragile, expensive, and unjust system to define another generation of Mindoreños, or whether we will finally build the energy future this island deserves.
We have the resources. We have the technology. And in the communities already living by solar light, we have the proof that another path is possible. What we must now build together is an energy system that is truly affordable, reliable, and clean for every Mindoreño, every day of the year.
