High power rates: Alarm bells for President P-Noy!

SHOOTING STRAIGHT By Bobit S. Avila (The Philippine Star) Updated July 30, 2011 12:00 AM  * * * I had a grand time reading the 25th silver anniversary issue of The Philippine STAR, which felt as thick, if not thicker than the New York Sunday Times during its heyday. It was great to read once more the articles of the late Sir Max Soliven and the late Ma’am Betty Go-Belmonte and Art Borjal as they related their respective stories of why they had to leave a very successful newspaper called the Philippine Daily Inquirer, and now I’m keeping these news clippings in my own personal files. Indeed, time flies ever so quickly. So let’s hope to see you in our next big anniversary bash… the 30th anniversary. * * * With President Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino, III’s State of the Nation Address (SONA) over and done with, we should be getting ready to apply full power and get this sick nation of ours out of the economic rut that we’ve been stuck in the past 25 years. But then House Deputy Speaker Lorenzo Tañada revealed something that many businessmen already knew… that the Philippines is now the record holder for having the highest cost of electricity in Asia! We’re paying P8.14 per kilowatt-hour for power in this country. If you ask me, this report ought to sound the alarm bells within the Aquino administration to search for solutions to bring down our electricity rates. I just interviewed my good friend, Cebu Investment Promotion Center (CIPC) executive director Joel Mari Yu and he told me that when you are courting foreign investors, they ask you three questions: first, whether you have stable electric power; second, what is the cost of that power; and third, whether you would still have that power in the next five years. Joel very clearly told me that for us Filipinos, it is okay for us if we are subjected to a one or two-hour blackout per day because we merely leave the house and come back when there is power. But to a foreign investor, a 30-second power outage means a huge business loss. Now we’re talking about stable power. Where we fail terribly is in the cost of that power. Supposedly, the Power Sector Assets and Liabilities Management Corp. (PSALM) was created to rationalize our power problems, but it has ended with P134.9 billion in loans and expenses which it incurred from 2007 to 2010. Add the reality that most of our regulatory agencies, which were created on behalf of the consumers, end up siding with the power operators. Mind you, this is not happening only with the Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC), but it is also true of all regulatory agencies like the CAAP, LTFRB, NTC or MARINA. This is something that President P-Noy totally missed out in his SONA and if he wants his economic team to achieve their seven to eight percent GDP growth targets, President P-Noy must seriously sit down with these regulatory agencies and perhaps remove the “utak wang-wang” that has permeated the minds of the officials of these governmental bodies so that they, too, must change their attitude in serving the basic needs of the Filipino people. * * * For e-mail responses to this article, write to vsbobita@mozcom.com or vsbobita@gmail.com. Avila’s columns can be accessed throughwww.philstar.com.