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MONDAY, 23 APRIL 2012 20:03 BUTCH DEL CASTILLO / OMERTA
DURING the so-called power summit convened by the administration in Davao City to address the raging power crisis in Mindanao, certain lawmakers from that part of the country broached the possibility of revisiting the Electric Power Industry Reform Act (Epira) of 2001.
Those lawmakers apparently hadn’t analyzed the Mindanao crisis as well as the National Association of Electricity Consumers for Reforms (Nasecore), which knew exactly what went wrong in the power sector of Mindanao.
If you ask Petronilo “Pete” Ilagan, founding president of the 12-year-old Nasecore, there’s nothing wrong with the Epira as far as ensuring adequate electric power supply in the country. The letter of this law anticipated the country’s power needs and specifically empowered the Department of Energy to deal with the issue, Ilagan said.
He said the people of Mindanao should realize that it is the negligence and failure of the government—specifically the Department of Energy (DOE) and the Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC)—to implement the Epira’s provisions that is at the root of the problem.
Ilagan said Mindanao folk wouldn’t be suffering eight-hour daily power outages today if the DOE had not been “sleeping on the job” for the past nine years.
Under the law, it is the DOE’s responsibility “to ensure the reliability, quality and security of supply of electric power” throughout the country. The Epira gave it ample powers to supervise and control all government activities pertaining to energy projects. It also empowered the DOE to punish distribution utilities that do not comply with its directives.
“The DOE was well aware of this mandate. In fact, it even issued a circular in 2003 [two years after the Epira was signed into law] that was to put into motion a 10-year power development plan,” Ilagan revealed.
This circular required all distribution utilities to “take cognizance and assume full responsibility to forecast, assure and contract for the supply of electric power in their respective franchise areas to meet their obligations as a distribution utility.”
Under Section 4 of this circular, the DOE even warned that “any distribution utility that fails to comply shall be immediately recommended for appropriate sanction, fines and/or penalties, including modification and revocation of its certificate of public convenience or necessity, license or permit…to the ERC.”
In that 2003 circular, the energy secretary was fully aware that its 10-year power development plan called for the filling up of a “critical reserve requirement” in various regions in the country.
After issuing the 2003 circular, however, the DOE never followed through with its 10-year power-development program. No concrete steps were ever taken by the DOE despite intermittent reminders from Nasecore that the country needed to beef up its power-generation capabilities to satisfy a growing national demand.
Nasecore’s official reminders to the DOE were all ignored, however. In 2010 parts of Mindanao started to experience rotating brownouts and higher power costs.
This prompted Nasecore to file a formal petition with the ERC to force the DOE to implement even an improvised power-development plan.
That petition was filed with the ERC on March 30, 2010—or more than two years ago when Mindanao started to experience economically crippling power outages. Since then, rotating brownouts became a common worsening occurrence.
The power situation in Mindanao could only worsen, as there has been no significant increase in the area’s generation capacity for almost a decade now.
The latest crisis can only be described as the culmination of a decade’s inaction or neglect by the DOE.
The ERC, meanwhile, has been apparently as unconcerned as the DOE about ensuring adequate electricity anywhere in the country. This was Nasecore’s conclusion when the ERC did not react one way or the other to the petition for two years.
It was only after the power crisis in Mindanao had lately become a national scandal that the ERC started going through the motions of giving Nasecore’s petition due course.
In its two-year-old petition, Nasecore denounced the following acts of gross negligence on the part of the DOE:
Failure of the energy secretary to comply with his statutory mandate of ensuring the reliability, quality and security of electric power supply. Because of this, Nasecore asked the ERC for “affirmative relief” in behalf of millions of power consumers in the country.
The energy secretary’s failure to comply with his legal duty under the Epira was tantamount to dereliction of duty. It resulted in power outages in Mindanao, leading to no less than a declaration of a state of calamity in the area.
The resulting damage to electricity consumers, not only by depriving them of steady and reliable electricity but also by increasing their electricity bills, should be blamed on the energy secretary for not doing his duty as provided for in the Epira.
The energy secretary’s “nonfeasance” is a continuing violation of the right of the people to electricity and to be reasonably charged for their consumption, “necessitating redress before the ERC as regulator of the electric power industry. Respondent’s inaction has furthermore undermined and weakened the economic system of the country, something that is akin to economic sabotage.
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