10/03/2026
Gas prices hit another record high this week. On the bright side, media gaslighting is down significantly.
Not completely. But lower, thanks to the rising price of fuel.
You see, for years now, every time someone brought up EVs as protection against fuel price spikes, someone else would appear to explain — with great confidence — that electricity comes from oil anyway. So you’re not really saving anything. You’re just moving the guilt around.
It was a good line. It just wasn’t true. Not here at least.
Quick reality check on the Philippine grid: around 60% coal, 15–18% natural gas, 21–22% renewables — geothermal, hydro, solar, wind. Oil-based generation? Near zero on most days.
So when someone tells you your EV still runs on oil, they’re borrowing an argument built for somewhere else and pretending it fits us. It doesn’t.
But here’s the part that actually matters. The part almost nobody writes.
The Philippines imports over 90% of its oil. We sit on some of the most contested sea lanes in the world. Every time there’s a flare-up in the Middle East or a move in the South China Sea, the pump price here doesn’t just rise. It rises fast, hits hard, and takes the peso down with it.
The jeepney driver, the TNVS operator, the family running one car on one income — they absorb a decision made by people who have never heard of us and don’t particularly care.
EVs don’t dodge oil entirely. But they dodge this oil. And this is what the numbers look like.
A typical EV commute in Metro Manila runs roughly ₱4 per kilometer on home charging. Gas right now is ₱10–15. When the pump hits ₱90, that gap doesn’t narrow. It explodes.
This isn’t virtue anymore. It’s arbitrage.
And I’ll be honest. I’m a car guy. I love internal combustion. I was never an EV enthusiast, and I wasn’t quiet about it.
So when I say the people who made that call early were right — I mean it. They read the map correctly. For a country surrounded by sea, importing almost everything it burns, that map matters more than almost anywhere else on earth.
So take the win. You earned it.
But before the victory lap turns into a victory loop, here’s the pushback — because you deserve the full picture, not just the flattering parts.
Price insulation is real. Supply insulation is not. Not yet. When a typhoon knocks out power for three days, your EV becomes a very expensive paperweight. That’s not a small thing in a country where typhoons are a calendar event, not a news event.
So the complete answer is solar plus home battery plus EV. That combination solves both problems — the cost problem and the resilience problem. It’s the version that holds up when things actually go wrong, not just when markets are moving in your favor.
Most EV owners are halfway there. The ones who’ve closed the loop — grid-independent, storm-ready, running on sunlight — they’re not just saving money. They’re operating on a different logic entirely.
They didn’t just earn the independence.
They generated it.
