CAMIGUIN, Philippines — When Typhoon Odette hit Cebu in 2021, Graham Pilapil did not have power in his home for an entire month. To continue working, he traveled to his company’s office every day to do his IT job, which was supposed to be fully remote.

He eventually moved back to his home province of Camiguin in 2024, bought a 250-square-meter house, and has since lived there with his wife and four children. But even in a different region, power outages — shorter, but at frequent intervals — continued to plague him.

This time, though, he was paying one of the country’s highest electricity prices for it.