Summit to find out if RP still in power crisis
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
HAS an energy crisis descended on the islands? Or is it still looming far on the horizon?
When a 600-megawatt generator of the Sual Power Plant in Pangasinan conked out last week, the basic rates of electric power in Luzon suddenly shot up. It brought grim recollections of crippling power blackouts during the administration of then President Corazon Aquino.
Back-up generators that were activated to make up for the lost capacity must have been fed with expensive oil-based fuel. In some islands of the Visayas and the industrial regions in Northern Mindanao, intermittent power brown-outs have become more frequent.
The symptoms of a crisis are beginning to show, These latest development in the power sector have surfaced during consultation-meetings called by the Export Development Council (EDC) this week in preparation for the National Competitiveness Summit on September 29.
One of the key issues identified for action in the summit is the high cost of electric power in the Philippines, second only to Japan in the whole of Asia. Solving that particular problem was seen by summit organizers as a big leap in enhancing the country's ability to compete for investments and markets.
But in last Wednesday's meeting of the power sector task force for the summit, the reliability of power supply cropped up as equally urgent issue. No new power plant has been built after the term of President Fidel Ramos.
Members of the task force had come to the conclusion they have to make a quick study on whether or not there already is an electric power crisis in the country that may require direct government intervention in the sector.
If the answer to that question is yes, the task force is set to recommend that the President will declare a state of emergency so that the problem could be solved with dispatch. In their search for ways of trimming power rates, task force members pointed at the very high charges taken by the National Transmission Corporation (Transco) of P1 per kilowatt-hour as tolling fee.
It is a big source of high electric rates. Another factor that makes electric rates in the Philippines second highest in Asia are taxes, the 12 percent value-added tax (VAT) plus other taxes which make up about 17 percent of the bill paid by consumers.
The distributors like Manila Electric Company (Meralco), with high power losses or electricity lost through theft and line inefficiencies that get passed on to consumers, can absorb their losses, instead of penalizing the public for their inefficiencies.
But the bulk of the high power rates were traced to generation which make up between 60 percent and 67 percent of the bill paid by end users. Generation rate is ironically highest in Luzon at P3.89 per kilowatt-hour (kwh) despite claims by power officials that the area is free from the use of imported oil-fed power plants. (Abe P. Belena/Philexport News and Features/Sunnex)
posted by philpower @ 2:23 PM,
