By Pastor Apollo Quiboloy Posted on Apr. 01, 2013 at 12:01am
From the darkness of Mindanao’s blackout nights come memes gleaming with sarcasm. “In Mindanao, it ain’t just Earth Hour, it is Earth Month,” goes one. Or they are laced with wit: “What comes next after Easter Sunday? Black Monday, Black Tuesday, Black Wednesday.”
Though Mindanaoans have lost their electricity, they haven’t entirely lost their sense of humor. But make no mistake about it—they are gnashing their teeth. The frustration index is at an all-time high.
And for a city in Mindanao, that frustration reaches the boiling point when power goes out just as all the residents are glued to their favorite telenovela or are counting the dying seconds of a thrilling basketball game. If a satellite happens to pass by overhead the exact moment the plug is pulled, it can probably hear the curses of thousands of people.
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Blackouts are becoming a yearly summer spectacle in Mindanao. This year’s edition is but a repeat of the one that tormented 22 million Mindanaoans in 2012, 2011 and 2010.
It’s like watching a rerun of an old film. You hear the same unscripted complaints and the same scripted promises. “Rotating” blackouts beget regurgitated responses from people who pass through the revolving doors of the bureaucracy.
If you Google news stories two years ago and compare them to ones recently filed, you won’t see any difference except for the date and the names of one or two persons quoted in the reports
Senatorial candidates who are casting a moist eye on Mindanao votes are of no help, either. They offer cute replies but no concrete solutions. These parachutists can be grouped into two. One group would want us to simply curse the darkness; the other would want us to light the candle and wait for higher power to come in.
In the meantime, the people are kept in the dark. Explanations as to their plight do not go beyond the regular power interruption notices. They’re not being told how they will be emancipated from darkness. Thanks to politicians, all the discussions have generated heat but no light so far.
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Fortunately, there is one government think-tank which has studied the anatomy of Mindanao blackouts and how to end them. Published by the Philippine Institute for Development Studies eight months ago, “Finding Solutions to Mindanao Electric Problem” traces the roots of Mindanao’s slow descent into the Dark Ages and spells out ways on how to hoist it back to the age of “en-light-enment.”
Authored by Adoracion Navarro, the 26-page study makes a slim volume—thinner than a comic book and thus within the attention span of most government officials to comprehend. This should be made required reading for them.
The paper posits that Mindanao’s power woes can be traced to its “inadequate baseload capacity and unbalanced generation capacity mix.”
You see, half—or 51 percent—of Mindanao’s power source come from hydropower plants, and the latter are not meant to be baseload plants. Ideally, baseload plants should be reliable generators and should not be dependent on the vagaries of nature.
If half of your power is dependent on rainfall, and can be sabotaged by acts of men, like scalping the trees off watershed areas, then hydropower plants cannot be deemed fail-safe electricity providers.
The inconvenient truth is that climate change and chainsaws have reduced the reliability of hydropower plants. When drought strikes, the juice the grid needs dries up, too. And this has frightful consequences because at present only one-third of Mindanao’s dependable power capacity come from non-hydro baseload plants.
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Compounding this is Mindanao’s aging hydroelectric plants. One in the Agus complex was commissioned in 1953, which makes it a senior citizen this year. It is soldiering on beyond the 30-year lifespan of its mechanical parts.
Downstream is plagued with problems too. Waterways are silted like the one in Pulangi River. And upstream, the mighty Lanao Lake is grappling with siltation, courtesy of the denudation of the mountains that ring it.
To its credit, the government has ordered the dredging of these waterways. And on paper, it has ordered a massive replanting of the mountains that funnel water into these catch basins. If I may add, it should clamp down on logging for any benefit out of planting 100 saplings is cancelled by the chopping down of one mature tree.
Navarro’s paper is chockfull of prescriptions. They range from the rehab of the Agus-Pulangi hydropower axis to the improvement of the embedded power capacity of electric coops to addressing the risk-aversion issues in baseload contracting to the interconnection of the Mindanao and Visayas grids to fast-tracking renewable energy projects.
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I hope that these and other prescriptions are heeded because on top of the current 300-megawatt deficit in the Mindanao grid, the island’s growing population and improving economy need an additional 100 megawatts a year.
We should remember that Mindanao’s economic performance always outpaces the national GDP growth rate. With affluence comes the appetite for electricity. With great purchasing power comes great power needs.
But we all know that power plants are not those microwaveable popcorns that can be ready in minutes. These are long-gestation projects that need funds, foresight and fortitude. The last one is important because there are times when we have to trade environment concerns for electric current. Or when we have to pay higher electricity bills for clean power.
So this early, government should explain to the people of Mindanao what it plans to do so there will be the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel in 2015 as promised by Malacañang. With the hundreds of millions it spends on advertising, government can and should take out ads, engage social media and produce popular literature that will convince and comfort the participants of the world’s longest Earth Hour that something is being done about their plight.
This is the only way to slay the swirling superstitions about the blackouts. source
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