STATE-RUN National Power Corp. on Thursday sought help from the Joint Congressional Power Commission for P15 billion in loans from private banks to finance its operations and missionary electrification and renewable energy projects.
Company president Froilan Tampico said National Power “has no longer flexibility to advance necessary expenditures [on] small power utilities groups using revenues generated for the main grid operations.”
But commission co-chairman Sergio Osmeña was unmoved, saying National Power had yet to improve its collection efficiency that was now down to only 65 percent.
“NPC is too much in debt,” he said.
“Congress will not approve to that. We will have to ask the Department of Energy to develop a more credible long-term business model for Napocor so that it will be sustainable.”
Tampico said National Power’s financing problem must be solved to enable it to deliver power to the areas not connected to the transmission system. Those missionary areas, which pay less for electricity, covered 3,947 villages in 37 provinces, or about 650,000 households, he said.
But Osmeña said the government would have to study National Power’s request before making any decisions to help it bridge its financing gap. –Rey T. Salita, Manila Standard Today
