Published May 4, 2019, 10:00 PM By Myrna M.
Velasco
Despite its mandate under the
Electric Power Industry Reform Act (EPIRA) that it shall ensure reliable,
quality and sufficient power supply for the country, the Department of Energy
(DOE) admitted in a Senate hearing that it just inspected one power plant out
of the 22 generating facilities that conked out from the March to April
episodes of yellow and red alerts.
Section 37 of the power industry
reform law expressly mandated the DOE to be the agency that shall secure power
supply for the Filipino consumers – and that has been reinforced with the
department’s own Circular (DOE Circular No. DC2010-03-0003) issued on February
26, 2010.
Hence, without DOE inspecting the
causes of forced outages in power plants, it will be reneging on its very
mandate of guaranteeing reliable as well as sufficient and quality electricity
service for consumers.
Energy Assistant Secretary Redentor
Delola disclosed that it was just the Sual power plant in Pangasinan that was
inspected by the DOE. That pales very much in comparison to the nine plants
visited and technically inspected by the Energy Regulatory Commission.
Instead of keeping pace with the
department’s mandate, Energy Secretary Alfonso G. Cusi preferred to toss that
responsibility to the ERC, although it is clear in EPIRA’s prescription that
the ERC’s function revolve around rate-setting; while DOE is in-charge of the
provision of enough power supply.
Under Section 37 (d) of the EPIRA,
it was explicitly stated that the DOE shall “ensure the reliability, quality
and security of supply of electric power; and further in Section 37 (l), the
department was enjoined “to formulate and implement programs, including a
system of providing incentives and penalties for the judicious and efficient
use of energy in all energy-consuming sectors of the economy.”
When asked why the DOE had not
inspected the power facilities on unplanned outages, Cusi said “that’s
technical and we are not the regulator.” All of his predecessor-secretaries at
the department though exercised discretion on power plant inspections and
investigations when power facilities suffered mechanical breakdowns during
their watch.
On the part of the ERC, it had done
field visits to gather information and data as to the real causes of the forced
outages in power plants.
The electricity generating assets
visited by the ERC included the GNPower Mariveles coal plant of the Ayala
group; SCPC Limay coal plant of San Miguel Corporation; South Luzon Thermal
Energy Corp plant units 1 and 2 of the Ayala group; First Gen Santa Rita plant
of the Lopez group; Southwest Luzon Power Generation Corp of the Consunji
group; Pagbilao-3 coal plant of Aboitiz Power Corporation and TeaM Energy
Philippines; Malaya thermal plant and the Sual coal-fired plant.
ERC Commissioner Catherine P. Maceda
reiterated that the Commission “was able to inspect nine (9) plants out of the
16 that had breakdown between March 5 to April 15, that’s more than half of the
plants on outage.” She added that five more plants were on forced outages after
that and the ERC was also planning to undertake field visit for technical
inspection on these facilities.
“All of them have been validated,
the details of the technical breakdown, we will have to assess that when we
finally have the technical report,” the ERC official stressed.
No comments:
Post a Comment