SHOOTING STRAIGHT By Bobit S. Avila (The Philippine Star)
Updated March 01, 2012 12:00 AM
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Summer will soon be here and once more Mindanao will suffer power outages because like it or not, many of their power sources come from hydro power plants. That means chances are high that what happened to Mindanao last year will be repeated again this year. So what’s new under the present centralized system of governance, where we never fix our problems?
I’ve been cutting news reports about this in the inside pages of our national dailies… like what The STAR reported last Friday entitled “NGCP resorts to power curtailment in Mindanao.” Currently Mindanao has a total capacity of 1,052 MW, but its demand is 1,263 MW, which is a 211 MW deficit. This has now affected the Cities of Davao and Cagayan de Oro and while the summer drought has not yet started, things could go from bad to worse.
A year ago, I was in Davao City during the National Big Bike convention, but rather than join the big bike activities, I visited the 42.5 MW Mini-Hydro power plant operated by Hedcor-Sibulan, Inc., a subsidiary of Aboitiz Power Corp. It was a rough 10 kilometer 4x4 drive from the national road up to the Sibulan River and it was truly awe-inspiring that Mindanao is so blessed with these mini-hydro plants that do not need fuel like bunker oil.
Fortunately for Davao City, Aboitiz Power has embarked on its 300MW coal-fired power plant at a cost of P25 billion. This is a circulating fluidized-bed coal fired power plant that they dubbed “Cleanergy.” It is similar to clean coal technology that the Global Power Corp. is operating in Toledo City, Cebu in partnership with the Cebu Energy Development Corp. (CEDC) with its Taiwanese partners, the Formosa Power.
But I heard that there were problems in Davao due to the environmentalists who were trying to block this project. If any, one of the biggest problems we face today are the non-government organizations (NGO) that block every power project so they could “earn” their keep. This happened to us in Cebu when we were constructing our power plants.
Whenever the power industry tries to solve our power problems, the almost always encounter problematic NGO’s who insist that coal fired power plants are dirty and toxic. Of course, they don’t tell you that there is a new technology called “Clean Coal” which Formosa Power has installed in the City of Taipei. A couple of years ago, the Cebu media got a first hand look at the Formosa Power plant sitting right beside a shopping mall. It’s smokestack emitted only white smoke. Even my good friend, Super Bobby Nalzaro of DySS who always wear his immaculate white clothes went up near the top of the smokestack where we were engulf with white smoke and it was mere water vapor and he didn’t get any black soot on his clothes.
Lately, I heard that another NGO is causing problems in Zambales, Bataan and Olongapo City because the Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority (SMBA) partnered with RP Energy, Aboitiz Power and the Taiwan Cogeneration Corp. (TCC) to construct a clean-coal power plant. Again, the NGO’s insist that this technology doesn’t clean up the coal. They just don’t know that the Cebu media is the worst people to convince… but we saw this technology in Taiwan and now it is sunning smoothly in Toledo City.
If you looked closely, many of these NGO’s have links with the allied front organization of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) whose only goal is to prevent our economy from moving forward least the CPP becomes irrelevant. This is exactly why were are not happy with the Aquino Regime’s having leftist people like Political Adviser Ronald Llamas, whose chief advisor is Francisco Nemenzo, an avowed Marxist. This is what we mean by Pres. PNoy’s sleeping with the enemy.
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For email responses to this article, write to vsbobita@mo-pzcom.com or vsbobita@gmail.com. His columns can be accessed through www.philstar.com.
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