Voice from the South
Manila Bulletin
September 8, 2011, 11:47pm
MANILA, Philippines — Energy is pivotal in industrialization. If we want to provide jobs for our people we need to industrialize. We are just too many to depend on agriculture to efficiently use up the energy of our available man power. Without energy or power, there is no industrialization. Power is basically electricity except for cars electricity is what is meant by power. And even cars are slowly shifting to electric power.
Our country is blessed, thank God, with tremendous sources of electricity. What we have been used to is petroleum or fossil fuels because of its convenience. But electricity can be produced from a dozen different other sources most of which are renewable energy sources.
Few lands have more rain than this country; therefore, to harness hydro resources is the most obvious. This has been delineated by older statesmen like Filemon Rodriguez who promoted development of Maria Christina falls.
But hydro is only one of our abundant sources. We are on the Pacific ring of fire. Anywhere near a volcano there are hot stones that if doused with water will produce steam ready for turning turbines for electricity. We are looking at geothermal locations with spring water already built in.
But there are hundreds of other locations where hot stones exist, waiting to have water poured over it to produce steam. The critical factor in geothermal projects is the quality of water used, because the minerals in the water corrode the pipes of steam. We have not yet got the technology of how to line the pipes with ceramics to avoid corrosion.
Besides hydro and geothermal we have a lot of garbage and wood waste that can fuel bio mass sources of power. Then we have the oceans. There is water all around us and rushing waters like San Bernardino Straits and Surigao Strait that are waiting to be harnessed. (There is a Filipino inventor dreaming of harnessing San Bernardino and producing enough electricity for the whole country.)
Then we have winds because of open seas. Besides that we have wind channels between mountain ranges that have constant wind blowing. And finally we have the sun. There are two types of solar harnessing. The first is with the use of parabolic mirrors focusing the sun’s rays to heat up water and again producing steam. But the more sophisticated use of sun rays is with the diode. Although much has already available in this, the technology of solar panels, it is not yet mature.
We must let the big industrialized nations pioneer this and we will just imitate them. We do not have the enormous amount of money needed for this research. But we have the hot sun ready to be tapped when the technology becomes available or rather becomes affordable or efficient. But for our isolated island this may be the way to go even now.
The objective is not only to have electricity available for our people and for industrialization but also to make it affordable and even cheap. We are among the highest cost power nations even though we have abundant resources which we have not tapped.
We are now moving from a government monopoly to a competitive market environment for electricity. It is far from ideal at present with power companies making windfall profits. But this is a normal transition. The aim is to make electricity available abundantly at affordable prices which means below the world standard of below ten US cents or about R4.20 per kilowatt hour.
It can be done. Right now we are paying twice or three times this world standard or even more depending on the location. If we have the power then we can have industrialization and jobs for our people leading to decent living as children of God. <emeterio_barcelon@yahoo.com>
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