Osmeña: power industry neglected

Don’t blame Meralco or the Department of Energy if there is still no electricity in your home. Or for the rotational brownouts. Blame Typhoon “Glenda” and former president Gloria Arroyo. Gloria Arroyo? Why blame her? She has been out of office for more than four years already.

Here is why. First, Glenda brought down many power lines: electric poles toppled and huge trees fell on electric lines. It takes time to put up electric poles and string out new power lines. Meralco and the National Grid Corp. of the Philippines (NGCP) have sent out thousands of workers to do these things.

The NGCP is responsible for connecting the power plants to the grid. Meralco is responsible for distributing the electricity from the grid to the customers in its franchise area. As of this writing, Meralco claims that 87.25 percent of customers in its franchise area have power. In Metro Manila, only 2.64 percent of Meralco’s customers are left with still no electricity. In nearby provinces, bigger percentages are still experiencing rotational brownouts.

Why don’t my neighbors and I have electricity? Many irritated homeowners are asking this question. Probably there is something wrong with the electric circuitry in your home or to the line connecting your home to the distribution line. Call Meralco or a qualified electrician to check your home circuitry.

But why did we have electricity and then lost it again for four or five hours? That’s not the fault of Meralco or the NGCP. It is the fault of the power generating plants. Five power plants shut down during the typhoon. Imagine how much power was lost. Three of them have come back online but two are still not operating. So there is still a power shortage. Even with all the power plants operating full time, the reserve power is still thin; so that when something happens to a plant, the reserve is not enough to cover the shortage.

But what has poor Gloria Arroyo got to do with it? Why blame her?

Because we should have had more power plants. Why blame her and not P-Noy for the lack of power plants?

Because it takes four to five  years to build one power plant, as Sen. Serge Osmeña explained at the Kapihan sa Manila at the Diamond Hotel last Monday, Arroyo should have started building power plants during her term for the plants to come online during the term of her successor. If P-Noy does not start building more power plants now, he would be blamed for the power shortages that would surely come after his term.

The power industry has been neglected by a succession of presidents, Senator Osmeña said at the Kapihan. And yet power is a major requirement in the economy. The economy will not grow if there is not enough electricity. Factories and other businesses need electricity to be able to operate.

Even just the increase in population requires more power. More people use more electricity. The overabundant shopping malls alone require so much power.

We invite other countries to invest in the Philippines, but they will not do that if we have insufficient power. Electricity is a major necessity of any business, factories especially, which we need to provide work for our people.

Our available power is not only insufficient but also very expensive. We have the second highest power rates in Asia. High power rates means high production costs for businesses. So why would investors come to the Philippines in a situation like that?

Our power rates are high because most of the power plants use expensive fuel: diesel and bunker oil. Coal is cheaper but it is a very dirty fuel—it pollutes the environment. Power from hydroelectric and geothermal plants are not only clean, they are also cheap. We should have more hydroelectric power plants, big and small, but the government stopped the construction of the Laiban Dam in Rizal which it had already started. Why? We don’t know.

Nuclear power is cheaper, but we are afraid of anything nuclear. Our first nuclear power plant, after spending billions of pesos on it, is now rusting in Morong, Bataan. When it was proposed that it be revived, the opposition was so huge that the plan was immediately dropped.

Renewable energy sources such as coconut, of which the Philippines has plentiful, and sugar cane, of which we used to be one of the world’s biggest producers, have been tried. We started producing coco diesel and “gasohol.” But because of the usual  ningas-cogon  mentality, the efforts were stopped. The Philippine Coconut Authority, after building a service station with coco diesel at its office beside the Quezon Circle, went back to its usual lackadaisical attitude. A proposal to plant on thousands of hectares of idle land the  tuba-tuba, which bears beans whose oil make good fuel, was enthusiastically adopted and started.  Tuba-tuba  seeds were indeed planted, but after the  ningas-cogon  enthusiasm disappeared, the planting stopped.

We have harnessed wind power in Ilocos, but the cost of building windmills is very heavy and the power generated by the wind we now have is pitifully small.

Ironically, we have much of the cheapest power source: the sun. But solar panels are still very costly to build. We can only dream about having such power plants.