THE COST OF CONNECTION: How NGCP’s Greed and ERC’s Final Stand Are Shocking the Nation into Awakening

There are charges in life that are inevitable: taxes, tolls, and truths. Then there are charges that should never be—those hidden beneath kilowatt-hours, smuggled inside corporate handshakes, and passed on to a public too distracted to notice.

Zapped. Outgoing ERC Chairperson Monalisa Dimalanta's report saw what regulators had long refused to confront: that we have been funding not just electricity, but extravagance.

For years, NGCP—the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines—has operated like an empire behind the wires: cloaked in technicality, shielded by privilege, and emboldened by a regulatory fog thick enough to hide its more indulgent habits.

CSR projects? Billboard campaigns? Corporate sponsorships with no bearing on the transmission of power?

All charged to you, the Filipino consumer.

It is a business model of burden redistribution, where profit is privatized and image costs are socialized—spread thinly across millions of households, like a surcharge so small it escapes scrutiny, but so widespread it enriches those who know how to game the grid.

But something is shifting. There is now a President—long accused of dithering—who seems to have finally read the fine print. A slow awakening, perhaps. But unmistakably real.

The public posture has changed. The tone has sharpened.

And there is, at last, a glimmer of resolve in the Palace: that the nation's energy cannot be held hostage by a private operator that behaves like it owns the wires, the wattage, and the will of the people.

In this space of transition, one name deserves to be spoken with clarity and, yes, with a sense of valediction: Monalisa Dimalanta.

The outgoing Chairperson of the Energy Regulatory Commission exits her post not with a whisper, but with a warning.

Before stepping down, she flagged NGCP’s ₱130 million in what she called “ad spends”—a euphemism for vanity, branding, and sponsorships that the ERC saw as having no direct relation to transmission operations.

She may no longer occupy the chair, but her final act is etched in policy memory. She stood at the edge of a system designed to blur accountability—and chose, at last, to name the cost of silence.

Dimalanta’s report was more than an audit. It was a mirror.

And in that mirror, the nation saw what it had long refused to confront: that we have been funding not just electricity, but extravagance.

There is no law that forbids corporate showmanship. But there is every moral reason to shield the people from paying for it.

What NGCP calls cost recovery, we must now call out as cost manipulation. What they defend as “pass-through,” we must now interrogate as a bypass of justice.

The wires that power the country must not be used to transmit greed. Not anymore.

This is the moment for policy to catch up with principle.

The ERC’s incoming leadership must pick up where Dimalanta left off—not with polite footnotes but with forthright reform.

The Department of Energy must reassert the state’s interest in a power sector too long driven by corporate logic. And Malacañang must not waver in this midcourse correction. The nation cannot afford another shrug from the top.

As the upcoming magazine Frontline Ink has said in print: “We are done being charged for someone else’s branding.”

Let that be our manifesto.

Let this be the last season where transmission towers double as PR scaffolds.

Let power finally serve—not just flow.

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Editor's note: As the wires hum and the watchdogs stir, there is a movement—quiet but growing—that seeks to bring back the weight of paper, the stillness of reflection, and the long-form courage that digital noise cannot mimic. Soon, this story—along with others buried beneath the algorithmic tide—will be told in full across the pages of a new publication committed to one thing: print that lives, not likes.