Published September 20, 2019, 7:04
PM By Danny
Estacio
MARINDUQUE – Why is an academic system of rating students’ essays
being used to determine the winners in bidding out big-ticket power contracts?
The question was posed by an
electric consumer advocacy group to call the government’s attention to the new
but highly questionable bidding method adopted by electric cooperatives that
could lead to higher rates in off-grid missionary communities.
Aya Jallorina, executive director of
Matuwid na Singil sa Kuryente Consumer Alliance (MSK) said the ‘’rubric’’
scoring system being used by two electric cooperatives in Palawan and
Marinduque is highly subjective and arbitrary, and the preferred supplier an
unfair edge.
The government must disallow such a
bidding method, Jallorina said.
The MSK raised its concern in a
letter addressed to Secretary Alfonso Cusi of the Department of Energy (DOE);
Agnes Devanadera, chairperson of Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC); Arsenio
Balisacan, chairman of Philippine Competition Commission (PCC), and
Administrator Edgardo Masongsong of the National Electrification Administration
(NEA).
The group said the rubric scoring
system has been adopted by the Marinduque Electric Cooperative (Marelco) and
the Palawan Electric Cooperative (Paleco) to determine the “lowest responsive
bid” for power supply contracts.
The system is widely used in the
academe, where students are graded for the quality of their work, like essays
and other academic papers.
This allows teachers to evaluate the
quality of the student’s work where quantitative scoring is not possible.
“We are concerned that the ‘rubric
scoring’ is another bid mechanism to enable the [power distributor] to award to
a preferred supplier and will discourage true competition,” MSK said.
It cited Marelco’s scoring system,
which gives only a 50 percent weight to the bid price and 50 percent to
qualitative and credential scoring.
The cooperatives resorted to bidding
method after the energy department disallowed the previous favorite resort of
electric coops — the Swiss Challenge or the unsolicited proposals, which
triggered “more expensive power supply that has been bloating the missionary
subsidies of these off-grid areas by billions of pesos every year,” MSK said.
“We don’t believe rubric scoring is
appropriate for CSP (Competitive Selection Process) biddings where the true
cost of generation that is contained in the financial bid is what is paid for
by the government,” it added.
Another term of reference that will
unduly raise missionary subsidies is the current ERC and DOE practice of
allowing guaranteed capacity payments for baseload power supply contracts that
has resulted in significant over-contracting of even inappropriate and onerous
terms of power contracts, the group said.
This is why Paleco has power
supplies of 80-MW to meet its 50-MW demand and is still experiencing outages,
it said. Now it is again bidding for 20MW power supply to raise its contracted
power to 100 MW, most of which will be guaranteed payments whether power is
used or not.
“The old system of bidders minimum
credential qualifications and definitive and verifiable specifications awarded
100 percent on straight comparable financial bids works and is more transparent
and truly competitive,” MSK said.
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