Blackouts in Mindanao to worsen this summer

Manila Standard Today
By Alena Mae S. Flores
Mar. 08, 2014 at 12:01am 10 

Iloilo City—The Energy Department expects power outages in Mindanao to reach an average of three to four hours during the dry season, with the continuing shutdown of a 210-megawatt coal-fired power plant and the reduced output of hydro-electric power facilities. 
“[Power shortage] will get worse a little bit on the average. Please note that DoE is doing everything it can,” Energy Secretary Carlos Jericho Petilla told reporters at the sidelines of the groundbreaking of Panay Energy Development Corp.’s 150-MW coal-fired power plant in Barangay Ingore, La Paz district in this city. 
Petilla’s announcement, ironically, brings little comfort to most of the Mindanoans, who had alleged on Thursday that they were already experiencing up to 10 hours on the average for the past several months. 
Petilla said the water level at the Agus-Pulangi hydroelectric power plants would also be a critical factor in determining the duration of brownouts in Mindanao. 
“That’s another 50 MW, another extra hour [of brownout],” Petilla said. 
He said the department was still determining the cause of the island-wide blackout on Feb. 27. 
The Mindanao Power Monitoring Committee, meanwhile, sought the immediate dispatch of capacities from embedded generators of distribution utilities, including the newly-installed modular gensets of several electric cooperatives measures, to bridge the power supply deficit. 
The committee, a power monitoring body created to initiate immediate and long-term steps to address the power situation in Mindanao, held a meeting Friday to assess the situation and determine the cause of island-wide blackout. 
The committee asked private distribution utilities to run their embedded capacities such as diesel generators and requested the Energy Regulatory Commission to accelerate provisional approval of pending rate applications for modular gensets that were installed. 
As this developed, Makabayan Bloc members in the House House of Representatives urged President Benigno Aquino III to certify as urgent a measure filed in Congress seeking a review of the Electric Power Industry Reform Act (Epira) law. 
Bayan Muna party-list Reps. Neri Colmenares and Carlos Zarate lamented that the Aquino’s administration’s ineptitude to deal with the power problem in Mindanao. 
“While we in Mindanao are suffering from long hours of rotating brownouts, even blackouts, it is unacceptable that the Aquino administration will just tell us to expect even more power outages until 2015 while it is still aggressively pushing its failed privatization policy,” Zarate said. 
He added that the President should have realized that the Epira law has been a failure with the recurring power interruptions in the region. 
“With the growing evidence now that the EPIRA-dictated privatization policy is a failure, all the more that we save and preserve the state’s remaining generation assets for the benefit of the people,” Zarate said. 
Zarate, together with Colmenares, authored House Bill 351 calling for the amendment of Sec. 47 of EPIRA and mandating, among others, that the following power generation facilities be exempted from privatization: The Agus and the Pulangui complexes in Mindanao, the Angat Hydroelectric Power plant in Luzon and the Naga Power Plant complex in the Visayas. 
The bill provides that “All state power barges shall be excluded from privatization. Their ownership shall be retained or transferred to the NAPOCOR [National Power Corp.] and shall continue to be operated by the NAPOCOR. The said complexes shall be subject to rehabilitation, upgrading and maintenance by the Napocor.” 
Colmenares urged Aquino to prioritize their measure which calls for a review of the Epira law. “Mindanaoans can no longer accept the fact that our power needs our continually being held hostage by a failing policy of privatization,” Colmeanres pointed out. 
Meanwhile, the Manila Electric Co. said generation charges would decline by P0.30 per kilowatthour this month due to the lower cost of power sourced by the power distributor from its suppliers. 
“We see a reduction of about P0.30 per kWh in the generation charge. Though the other components such as those transmission and the other charges may still affect the over- all cost in our customer’s bills,” Meralco spokesman Joe Zaldarriaga said. 
He said the company will come out with the final figures next week. 
The P0.30 per kWh reduction in the generation charge translates to P60 reduction in the bill of Meralco consumers with an average monthly consumption of 200 kWh. 
Meralco officials had said that generation charges may go down below P5.5359 per kWh this month due to moderate demand arising from the cool weather. 
“There are strong indications that March gen charge will be lower than February’s, based on information we currently have. Demand remained moderate because of cool weather while supply situation was normal,” Meralco head of utility economics Lawrence Fernandez said earlier. 
Fernandez said that based on initial figures, the cost of supply from our power supply agreements, independent power producers, and from the Wholesale Electricity Spot Market, the country’s trading floor of electricity have all gone down during the February supply month. 
Meralco collects the generation charge, which comprises majority of the electricity bill to pay for its power suppliers such as the IPPs, plants selling to Meralco under the power supply agreements and the WESM. 
The company has pegged its December generation charge to P5.6673 per kWh due to the issuance of a temporary restraining order by the Supreme Court. 
The TRO prevented Meralco from increasing its generation costs and other charges by a total of P4.15 per kWh in the December bills of consumers. The Supreme Court extended the TRO by another 60 days which will lapse on April 22. With Maricel V. Cruz source