The current power shortage in Mindanao is about economic planning, or the lack of it. Authorities knew beforehand that the island was vulnerable to supply disruptions because Mindanao for the most part relied on one major power source—the Agus hydro electric system.
The Mindanao situation had a sense of deja vu in it after Metro Manila and the entire Luzon power grid suffered debilitating blackouts in the early 1990s because of policy errors in the administration of the late President Corazon Aquino. That administration scrapped plans to operate the 620-megawatt Bataan nuclear power plant shortly after the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine in 1986. It did not, however, come up with a replacement plant to fill in the supply gap—all of 620 megawatts—resulting from the mothballing of the Bataan nuclear power plant.
The Mindanao case is no different. The island will be predicably short of supply, as what is happening today, because the new coal and goethermal plants were not enough to meet the demand of the population and Mindanao’s growing economy. The government, through the National Power Corp. and the Power Sector Assets and Liabilities Management Corp., has lost control over resources management on the island as the power sector reform law and weak finances limited its mandates.
The private sector should have taken over power generation in Mindanao as spelled out by law, but some misguided politicians believe the sector must be left with the government. The state, as proven in the past, is a poor operator of most business concerns and is easily swayed by popular issues without regard for return on investment and efficiency.
Mindanao, meanwhile, may not have suffered outages had policy makers pushed its submarine interconnection with Leyte island that would have brought power to it from as far as Tongonan and the generating plants in Luzon.
Ample power supply will hopefully be available in Mindanao by 2014, when the major coal-fired power plants are put in place. In the meantime, the industries and the people of Mindanao will have to bear the brunt of higher electricity rates from diesel-fed barges.
(Published in the Manila Standard Today newspaper on /2012/March/26)
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