Serious allegations
The Ombudsman’s P10.44-billion plunder and graft investigation against Sen. Loren Legarda and her son, Batangas Rep. Leandro Leviste, involving underdelivered solar energy projects is underway.
At the same time, the Department of Energy (DOE) has filed a complaint against the younger Leviste and five officials of the Solar Para sa Bayan Corp. (SPBC) for alleged violations of the Public Service Act before the Department of Justice.
The plunder and graft raps alleged that the Levistes conspired to secure multiple solar energy service contracts from the government through several corporations, locking out rival investors and creating a virtual monopoly. This followed Ombudsman investigators’ findings that the mother and son conspired to secure exclusive government rights over the country’s solar energy resources through legislative and regulatory actions and violated the Anti-Graft and Corrupt Practices Act, the Code of Conduct and Ethical Standards for Public Officials and the Plunder Law.
They found that numerous exclusive solar energy service contracts were awarded to corporations within the alleged network, but many projects were never developed as promised. The Ombudsman estimates that the total unpaid financial obligations to the government exceed P10.44 billion due to the terminated contracts.
In January, the DOE said that it has canceled 33 renewable energy service contracts of Solar Philippines Power Project Holdings Inc. (SPPPHI), also led by Leandro, for its failure to follow the timeline agreed upon for power production and that it is imposing billions of pesos in penalties for the failure to deliver on its commitments under its renewable energy service contracts.
SPPPHI is a renewable energy developer, while SPBC is its social enterprise unit. SPBC was awarded a congressional franchise in 2019 to construct, install and operate distributed energy resources and microgrids in remote and unviable, unserved or underserved areas in the country.
The senator’s camp, however, questioned the Ombudsman’s probe, saying no government funds were released for these solar ventures. According to Sen. Loren’s spokesperson, Tony La Viña, there was also no evidence that she used her position to help her son secure renewable energy contracts, calling the allegations purely political. The Levistes now claim that the probe is retaliation because Leandro became an anti-corruption crusader.
However, all these actions against the Levistes did not begin after Leandro started attacking corruption in government in late 2025.
As early as 2024, the DOE during a Senate budget hearing disclosed that 21 of 42 service contracts awarded to SPPPHI were already being processed for termination over alleged failure to meet scheduled targets. It was also reported that only 174.41 megawatts of the roughly 10,000 MW committed by SPPPHI and its affiliates had reached commercial operation.
La Viña also claims that the government was not disadvantaged. However, government injury is not necessarily limited to money released from the National Treasury. Government contracts can involve performance obligations, regulatory rights, bonds, penalties, fees and development commitments.
DOE said the terminated contracts represented around 11,427 MW of potential renewable energy capacity. Energy Secretary Sharon Garin said this capacity could have covered the annual increase in the country’s electricity demand.
In January, the Energy Regulatory Commission initiated the issuance of show cause orders against SPBC following consumer complaints and reports of alleged violations, including unauthorized operations and electricity rates imposed without prior ERC approval.
Former House deputy speaker and Manila mayor Lito Atienza also accused Sen. Legarda, who served on the appropriations committee, of offering to help secure a P10-million government fund allocation in exchange for his support for SPBC’s congressional franchise application. Atienza said that he voted against the grant of the franchise, claiming that SPBC was grossly undercapitalized and that from the beginning there was already bad faith – they were not intending to provide solar energy to the nation but were out to make a fast buck.
Government prosecutors must establish and prove all these allegations in court. But pretending they don’t exist and claiming they’re politically motivated doesn’t establish innocence either.
The National Grid Corp. of the Philippines (NGCP), the country’s sole transmission service provider tasked with delivering electricity from power generators to distribution utilities, has recently been releasing infographics that explain, in simple, friendly terms, what drives these grid alerts.
It explains that grid alerts can be triggered by various factors affecting the power system, including generation supply deficiencies and transmission disturbances, and that most red and yellow alerts happen when supply runs low due to unexpected plant outages.
For instance, of the 253 red alerts on June 30, at least 241 were due to generation problems and only seven from transmission-related issues, while of the 936 yellow alerts, 928 were caused by generation issues, including unplanned power plant shutdowns, and only three from transmission issues.
From 2016 through June this year, more than 95 percent of red alerts nationwide traced back to generation supply issues, not transmission failures.
NGCP then said the country needs reliable, stable baseload power plants built in the right places.
This matters most in the Visayas, Cebu in particular, because the region’s vulnerability is structural. Cebu imports roughly 60 percent of the power it consumes, drawing around 200 MW from Luzon and 450 MW from Mindanao through the Mindanao-Visayas Interconnection.
That interconnection, however, is also a bottleneck. It carries a fixed capacity regardless of how much surplus either neighboring grid happens to have on a given day. A large margin in Luzon does not translate into more relief for Cebu if the pipe connecting them can only carry so much.
Then there are news about solar farms breaking ground in Negros, wind projects rising in northern Cebu. Unfortunately, solar and wind are both unpredictable and treating them as a straightforward substitute for baseload is how a country ends up with an impressive capacity figure on paper and a rotational brownout in practice. Firm baseload capacity remains the piece nothing else currently in the toolkit fully replaces, which is precisely the point NGCP’s own infographic was trying to make.
Mindanao is not a reliable backstop at the moment either. It has been cycling its own yellow and red alerts through the same period Visayas has struggled. When the safety net itself is under strain, the system Cebu depends on for balance is not simply thin. It is thin on both ends.
The Visayas was never built to stand on its own supply. It carries too little embedded generation for its size; it depends on transmission links to Luzon and Mindanao that can only carry so much regardless of how much surplus either grid has on a given day, and both of those neighbors are, at the moment, managing tight margins of their own.
The average Cebuano was never let down by one power plant tripping. They were let down by a wiring diagram nobody bothered to explain to them, by years of demand growth that outpaced the buildout of the capacity meant to meet it, and by a public conversation that spent a decade celebrating renewable milestones without asking, with equal seriousness, what would carry the grid on the days that the sun and the wind did not cooperate.
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