THE Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) will release in the next few days its decision on the delayed transmission projects of National Grid Corp. of the Philippines (NGCP).

"The commission has made significant headways in resolving all these delays on NGCP's 37 delayed power projects that were mentioned by President Ferdinand 'Bongbong' Marcos Jr. also in his last year's SONA," said ERC Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Monalisa Dimalanta during the second day of the post-State of the Nation discussions on Wednesday.

"I just don't want to preempt the issuance of the decision, but the commission has already resolved this issue, and the actual print-out of the decision will be coming out in the next few days," she added.

Also, there are penalties that will be slapped on some projects that had unjustified delays, which formed part of the ERC's evaluation.

In 2023, NGCP said the main reasons for its transmission project delays were mostly right-of-way issues and the pandemic.

Dimalanta also gave an update on their investigation on the unplanned outages during the first two weeks of April, adding that the ERC is still compiling information and will impose penalties on operators whose power plants went beyond the allowed number of unplanned shutdowns.

ERC's probe on the outages during the period of second week of April showed 139 power units went on outage, and 37 of the operators exceeded their allowed number of outages, prompting the commission to issue show-cause orders.

"Once the explanations are submitted to the commission, and once we have completed the respective evaluations, for those that were not justified in their unplanned outages, we will also be imposing the proper penalties, as what we had already done so before," Dimalanta added.