The first time 52-year-old Juliana Balweg-Baawa switched on the light in her home, she jumped for joy. “My children can study at night!”

Balweg-Baawa, a native of Mataragan village in the rugged Cordillera mountains in the northern Philippines, relied on the short-lived flickers of a gas lamp for light until her village was electrified in 2003. She then bought a television to watch the news. She said she doubts her two children could have finished high school without being able to study by electric lamplight in the evenings.

“I have a refrigerator now. I sell frozen meat and cold drinks from the capital,” she said. “Life is hard up here. It’s far away. But at least now, we don’t have to pound rice, we can process it [with electric grinders].”

According to the Philippines’ Department of Energy, around 3.6 million households in the country are cut off from the mainstream electricity grid, most of which are in remote rural communities like Mataragan. However, through arduous community efforts, and a little help from civil society groups, some outlying villages devoid of modern infrastructure have achieved electrification by building and installing their own micro-hydro generators.

Mataragan, for example, is now home to two generators: one for household use and the other to pump irrigation into rice fields and power grinders that process rice from its husks. The village, which is predominantly Indigenous Igorot like most in the region, has electricity 24 hours a day, except on some hot summer days when the water flow through the turbines is too weak.

Communal efforts

Throughout the Cordillera region, where large-scale dams have been a frequent source of conflict, Indigenous villages have been turning to small renewable energy generators to power their homes and schools.

Two decades ago, a young Bubot Bagwan embarked on a week-long trek through the mountains with his neighbors from Pangued village, which sits alongside Mataragan in the Malibcong municipality of Abra province. Though Pangued has fewer than 100 households, dozens of able-bodied Igorot residents worked together to carry cement, machine parts and huge sacks of iron on their backs and on horseback through the thickets, rivers and slopes of the upland region.

Finally, reaching the village with their cargo was just the start. It would take months before they’d finish building the micro-hydro generator and producing the first few volts of electricity to eventually power all their homes.

“The micro-hydro got here even before any car or road did,” Bagwan, now 41, told Mongabay. At present, there are still no completely paved roads heading to Pangued and its surrounding areas.

The year before, in 2002, two other nearby villages had also acquired the same technology, Bagwan recalled. They, too, trudged and trekked through the circuitous mountain slopes, just to spark a bit of light.

“We thought something like this was impossible. But we did it through bayanihan, community efforts,” said Bagwan. At night, lampposts and house lights can create bright patches on the mountainside, like fireflies resting together on a shrub when seen from above.

The current government under President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. aims for 100% electrification of the country by 2028. Government guidelines, however, put the onus on communities to petition for their own electrification. To be eligible for grid connection, residents must submit several documents certifying their population and a map of the surrounding terrain.

Ernesto Silvano, Jr., deputy administrator of technical services at the National Electrification Administration (NEA), told Mongabay that many un-electrified areas are simply “too isolated” for grid connections to be feasible. For cases in the Cordilleras, he said, “I’m sure there are logistical concerns. Cooperatives are non-stock and non-profit. It will be unviable if they extend their lines too far.”

For these cases, the NEA offers its Solar Home System (SHS), a renewable energy alternative for areas where the lack of infrastructure makes electricity lines impractical.

However, Silvano, Jr. also said that because of underfunding, he isn’t sure if the country will make its 2028 ambitions, with or without renewables. To meet its targets, the NEA outlined a budget request of 69 billion pesos (about $1.2 billion at current exchange rates) over five years in 2023, with nearly half of that earmarked for the SHS. However, every year, the agency receives less than 2 billion pesos ($34 million) from the national government.

“We’ll make do,” Silvano, Jr. said. He additionally noted that electrification is also something of a moving target, with the population growing every year.

“Demand grows fast alongside the population. But not all our plants can keep up,” he said.

Amid the lack of electrification in far-flung areas, micro-hydro initiatives have emerged as a viable and cost-efficient alternative for marginalized communities. This is especially true for the Indigenous areas of the Cordillera region.

An NGO called Sibol ng Agham at Teknolohiya (Wellspring of Science and Technology), or SIBAT (which means ‘spear’ in Filipino) for short, has led and helped channel funds to many of the micro-hydro projects in the country.

“The Cordillera region is very important because of its abundant waters, rivers and watersheds especially. Plus, there are so many off-grid areas. It’s ideal for micro-hydros,” said Estrella Catarata, SIBAT’s director.

SIBAT provides funding and engineering designs, but the communities themselves take responsibility for the rest of the job, including construction, management and some of the repairs.

In just over two decades, SIBAT has helped facilitate the construction of 22 micro-hydro generators, 13 of them in Abra province, where Mataragan and Pangued villages lie. Each generator powers about a hundred households.

Waterpower

Just three of the 12 villages in Abra province’s Malibcong municipality are connected to the grid. The rest are powered by micro-hydro generators.

With its many headwaters and powerful river currents, the Cordillera region is also host to nearly a hundred big-ticket hydro-power projects including dams. However, Johnson Dalingay, president of the village cooperative that manages Mataragan’s generator, said residents aren’t interested in dams or mainstream electrification.

“We wouldn’t want the dams around here. Our rice fields are on low ground. A dam could submerge them easily, along with our homes. We’d have to move away elsewhere,” Dalingay told Mongabay.

He also said he feels connecting to the grid will “cause problems.” Most residents own basic appliances like television sets, washing machines and refrigerators and pay around 5 to 7 pesos per kilowatt-hour (3.6 megajoules). By contrast, Abra’s electric cooperative charges households connected to its grid rates of up to 17.6 pesos per kilowatt-hour.

Micro-hydro expert, engineer Jey Mart Erasquin, bats for micro-hydro as an alternative with a small carbon footprint and minimal alterations to ecosystems as they require only a meter-high dam. Besides, its entire use and collection system determined by community consensus.

“I wouldn’t recommend connecting to the grid,” Erasquin said. “It incurs a lot of costs and losses. Putting up big systems like dams and nuclear plants isn’t necessary if you have a decentralized system that can fulfill the needs of a small community.”

Obstacles in power

SIBAT’s work has rarely been straightforward, with Catarata citing interference from the military as one of their main challenges. In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Catarata encountered one military checkpoint after another just to reach communities like Mataragan, and “while you’re there, you get red-tagged too.”

Red-tagging is a practice in the Philippines where state authorities label an individual or organization as sympathetic to or supportive of armed insurgents. It often leads to some form of crackdown on civil society groups.

Jazmin Jerusalem of the Defend NGOs Alliance said the government is out to stifle critical voices and “hinder civil society organizations from their development work.” As of February 2025, 69 NGO workers from 21 organizations — including SIBAT — are facing terrorism charges.

Overseeing and aiding micro-hydro generators require occasional maintenance from expert engineers. However, during the pandemic, the military, under orders from the provincial government, barred SIBAT from reaching any of the communities. Authorities told them they were following lockdown procedures, but SIBAT believes this is because of their alleged rebel sympathies.

Catarata said the military “intimidated our engineers, confiscated their belongings, interrogated them on their motives, accused them and our projects of being designed by the insurgents.”

Two of their partner engineers also backed off the project entirely.

“The project was frozen,” said Romando Bacuyag, who was Malibcong mayor at the time. With few other options to grant electricity to his constituents, the municipal government backed initiatives with SIBAT even when the provincial government wasn’t so keen.

“The military suspected them of being illegal. So I had to help and convince the governor to let them in,” Bacuyag told Mongabay.

Moreover, in 2024, Catarata and 23 other NGO workers were slapped by the government with charges of financing terrorism. The case remains open, and SIBAT feels they are working under intense and malicious scrutiny.

While NGOs like SIBAT have since been allowed entry, they are closely monitored by soldiers whose many checkpoints around the Cordillera countryside remain in place. Reaching Malibcong’s villages requires permission from the local or provincial government.

Silvano, Jr., of the electrification administration, said he supports micro-hydro generators, which makes NEA’s job easier. However, he said, at some point, residents will have to connect to the grid in the name of economic progress.

“There will really be a price difference when that happens. You have to invest in the grid and transmission lines. But also, it usually carries increased power consumption which boosts the economy,” said Silvano, Jr.

That also means transferring to fossil fuel-generated power sources. He explained that, even with the number of projects in place, it will take a while before mainstream power distribution and generation in the Philippines convert to renewables.

“Many cooperatives are still locked into contracts that last 20 years. They can’t switch,” said Silvano, Jr.

Erasquin said he believes these challenges can still be navigated with community-based approaches. He, along with other engineers, has developed an electronic load controller to manage the electrical load across a growing number of households.

“We’re also looking at hydro-solar hybrids that can be easily deployed and used for whichever season,” he said.

Every Sunday, Bagwan leads four teams of 16 people each, which is practically half of their village, to unclog dirt and leaves accumulated in the generator’s filter.

He said that lately, “we’ve been learning to repair the turbine, too.” While the building and continued management of the generators have entailed unpaid labor from the residents, Bagwan believes it’s not much different from their lives as farmers. Both, he said, are for the common good and are the results of “bayanihan.”

Banner image: Bubot Bagwan explains how his community generates electricity for their rice mill inside the micro-hydro generator’s powerhouse. Image by Geela Garcia. 

Field reporting for this article was carried out with support from the Jaime Espina Klima Correspondents Fellowship. Mongabay had full editorial control of the published article.

Philippines hydro boom rips Indigenous communities

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