National Grid Corporation of the Philippines Also Has Much Like DPWH’s Ghost Projects

They poured concrete without rebar and called it a wall. We paid for flood control and got cement that cracked at the first storm.

NGCP’s capital outlay for delayed projects runs into tens of billions, yet the regulator fines them less than a boardroom’s coffee budget. (Photo: JDipterocarpus Wikimedia Commons)

That was the DPWH story — and it is much like that of the NGCP, which gets paid even for projects that were delayed.

In our energy sector, the ghost project wears a different face — unfinished transmission lines, delayed substations, and missing timelines that somehow still make it into our bills.

Consumers pay for the promise of infrastructure, while stockholders collect dividends from the delay itself.

The ERC penalized NGCP a few million pesos for late delivery — ₱3 million here, ₱12 million there — even as the company’s delays stretched across 75% of its ongoing projects. It’s an insult to arithmetic.

NGCP’s capital outlay for these projects runs into tens of billions, yet the regulator fines them less than a boardroom’s coffee budget.

Why so? Why does the ERC allow NGCP to earn even on delayed projects and merely slap it with token fines, when what the regulator should do is order a clawback — a refund of transmission charges collected for projects that were not completed on time? What gives?

Worse, under the as-spent policy, NGCP recovers costs — and earns a return — before a single line goes live.

That means unfinished work can still yield finished profits. The system rewards delay, and consumers shoulder the interest on waiting.

In 2019, NGCP declared ₱15 billion in dividends — roughly 75% of its ₱20.3 billion net income. In 2014, it went even further: ₱24 billion in dividends from only ₱22 billion in earnings.

Over the years, this pattern has persisted — dividends exceeding or matching profits, all while project backlogs pile up.

The ERC has been remiss in its mandate to ensure that the grid operator does not charge transmission costs for delayed projects that were never finished on schedule.

Executives are also among the highest paid in the energy sector, drawing millions in compensation even during the height of project delays.

And in an irony too rich to ignore, NGCP’s advertising and “advocacy” campaigns — which portray it as the nation’s tireless grid builder — are funded from the same revenues consumers pay for unfinished work. We are literally financing our own deception.

Where is the clawback? Where is the reckoning for billions paid on promises unfulfilled? TransCo has sounded the alarm, yet the ERC has not imposed refund mechanisms.

Instead, it raises the maximum allowable revenue (MAR) to ₱58 billion and authorizes ₱28 billion in under-recoveries — feeding a machine that charges for time lost and fines for nothing gained.

The ERC was meant to guard public trust. But by treating delay as an accounting error instead of a breach of duty, it has reduced oversight to ritual. A regulator that cannot regulate becomes an accomplice to impunity.

The ghost of DPWH’s dikes haunts the grid: concrete without steel, wires without current, fines without justice.

What rots infrastructure is not mere delay — it’s the comfort of unearned gain. Every dividend drawn from unfinished work is a nail driven into the coffin of public confidence.

Let the clawback be the beginning. Let every peso of profit from every delayed project be traced, tallied, and returned. Because the lights may flicker, but the truth cannot stay in the dark forever.

It is high time the Energy Regulatory Commission demanded a clawback — a refund of transmission charges that should never have been passed on to consumers.

Our legislators should compel the ERC to enforce these refunds for charges collected on delayed or unfinished projects — ghost transmission lines that earned even when nothing was on the line.

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