DOE pushes rehabilitation work on Marawi power infrastructure

Published October 20, 2017, 10:00 PM By Myrna M. Velasco

https://business.mb.com.ph/2017/10/20/doe-pushes-rehabilitation-work-on-marawi-power-infrastructure/

With the war-torn Marawi City in the government’s major focus now, the Department of Energy (DOE) has also jumped in to announce its planned rehabilitation of power infrastructure facilities in the area.

The rehabilitation process, the department said, will be rooted on the archetype of “energy resiliency,” although the specific assets to be repaired or replaced with new ones have yet to be identified.

No specific rehabilitation cost on power infrastructure projects had also been set out, but it is worth noting that the Lanao de Sur Electric Cooeprative (LASURECO) which is servicing the area, has already been heavily-indebted to the tune of more than P10 billion.

The DOE is also crafting its ‘energy resiliency policy’, but what is missing still is the department’s real drive, not just lip service, to enforce that in the industry.

In Marawi’s case, Energy Secretary Alfonso G. Cusi said, “the policy will help guide the massive restoration and rehabilitation efforts of energy facilities.”

He announced that his department is now “fast-tracking the issuance and implementation of the energy resiliency policy, as this would guide us, especially in rebuilding Marawi City.”

In a recent consultation that the agency had done in Mindanao, the DOE noted that the propounded edict on the “Adoption of Resiliency Planning and Program in the Energy Industry to Mitigate Adverse Effects Brought About by Disasters” keeps pace with the mandate of President Rodrigo Duterte to build infrastructure projects that are not only able to withstand ‘human-triggered’ attacks but more importantly of the multitudes of natural disasters wobbling the country.

Realistically, the DOE is still fledgling on its energy planning strategies, that until now it has not really come up yet with any concrete and tangible plans that should have been guiding the sectors it has been supervising.

Integrating ‘resiliency’ on its planning scheme then would be an added challenge, and getting there is even less clear now for many of the sector’s stakeholders.

Cusi can just assert at this stage that “with this policy, we are building with the industry players a structure on how to plan and address human-induced disasters that compromise existing power facilities.”

The department insisted that the proposed edict must “strengthen the existing energy infrastructure and systems; institutionalize the ‘build back better principle’; improve existing disaster resilience operations; and develop resiliency practices, systems and standards.”