John Jonas explains why the Philippines experiences brownouts: 1990s power privatization left limited generation capacity, seasonal water shortages during El Niño, and rising demand from air conditioning and remote work. Outages peak March through July and can last 1-6 hours, though solar deployment is reducing their frequency. Manila and Cebu have more reliable power than rural areas.
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Hello and welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing Podcast, the podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing your work. My name is John Jonas and this is episode 52. Do brownouts happen often in the Philippines? So let me give you some context. When I remember when I went to the Philippines the first time, I was looking around, actually, I've only been there once. It was in 2010. Walking down the street and you look up and you just see this massive, massive jumble. Power lines going through a power pole. And it's like, if there's ever a problem here, there's no way this gets fixed. Like, someone dies trying to fix this because these power lines are all over the place. So that's kind of like a beginning perspective of how power works in the Philippines. So just to give you some background on brownouts. So in the early 90s, the Philippines government started privatizing the power industry in an attempt to try and introduce investments and get private companies building infrastructure. Smaller big companies started popping up to start generating power. And this allowed the government to start focusing on building infrastructure and on building, developing it in more rural areas. So the first thing to know is that the infrastructure in big cities is way better than in rural places, although it's pretty good in rural places now. But if you're in Manila, in the metro Manila area, which includes like Manila, Quezon City, your infrastructure is going to be really good. Same thing with Cebu City. It's going to be really, really good. As you get further out, it gets less good. But still, like, most of my people don't have problems. And they're in Mindanao, they're in Negros, they're in Iloilo, they're in Bata, and most of the time they don't have any problems at all. However, like once a year for a couple months, there are these rolling brownouts in some places. And the reason for this is simple. It's supply and demand. There's. When the government privatized things, some of these companies, like, they were doing really well. And so they just did really well. And they didn't plan for population growth or population movements or for the added needs for electricity that would come given the Internet and people working from home. So there's extra climate change even is included in this because the Philippines is so hot. Air conditioning uses a lot of electricity. And the private companies just didn't address this well. And so their means of addressing it now is to shut off the power. So typically this will happen like March, April, May, June, maybe July, when it's hottest and driest in the Philippines. And if it's managed well, it'll be limited to like one to two hours per day. But if it's not managed well, or actually it might be like one to two hours every few days if it's managed well. If it's not managed well, it can be up to like four to six hours of no power at your house every day. And they'll rotate this. Like this part of the city is gonna be their power turned off from this time to this time. And this part of the city is gonna have it turned off from this time to this time. And they'll rotate that so it changes each day for when they're having their power turned off and for how long. And obviously the power companies are trying to manage it. It doesn't get done super well. All the time. To me, this is, I mean, obviously this is more common in rural areas because the more metropolitan it is, the better off their infrastructure is generally. If the summer is like really dry in the Philippines, like they have an El Nino, then it often leads to low water for the hydroelectric plants, which means less, which means less power. It means their geothermal plants are less efficient, which means less power. And then it also means increased demand for power. And so that kind of creates this perfect storm of problems for why you have more brownouts. I have never seen a means of avoiding this. The only way I've seen it is to hire in Manila or maybe in Cebu. But when you're looking to hire an ofs, I've never seen an efficient way to say like, no, I only want to hire someone from Manila, even though this person from Davao is really talented and that's the person I really want to hire. But I just want to wait and like, it just doesn't. I've never seen this work effectively saying like, I just want to hire someone in Manila when really I'm getting applicants from these other places that are really, really good and better than what I'm getting in Manila. And then also salaries in big cities, Manila, Cebu are usually significantly higher than, than in these other places. Part of that is because there's more work in those big cities. People are willing to accept less because there's just less work in these, in these other cities where they have the brownouts. So in all of this, thankfully progress is being made. It's been a while since, since I've seen my. Since I've had someone affected by like five hour brownouts every day where the power's turned off for five hours every day. I used to see that and I'm not seeing it as much anymore because renewable energy is taking over. There's a lot of solar going up in the Philippines. They are developing the infrastructure. The country recognizes the need to catch up and to be in the 21st century. Like, they're doing a really good job of improving this. So the brownouts are becoming less and less. Of course, if we have a really bad heat year there, then that may not be the case. So my advice is don't worry about this. The Ofsuhire is very likely to work around this. Like, they'll tell you, hey, sir, I'm sorry. During my shift today, the power went off for three hours. But don't worry, I'll make it up tonight or on Saturday. They're very likely to fix this to solve the problem for you. They've grown up with this. They know it's an issue. They're ready to deal with it. So, yes, brownouts happen. It's not like a major concern that I have when I hire, and I think it's something that you can kind of forget about about until it happens and let them handle it and manage the process for you.
