Blackouts worsened under Aquino govt

THE blackouts in Mindanao had grown worse since President Benigno Aquino III came to power two years ago, lawmakers and the environmental group Greenpeace said Sunday.

In separate interviews, Agham Rep. Angelo Palmones, former Senator Juan Miguel Zubiri, Bayan Muna Rep. Teddy Casiño, and Greenpeace Southeast Asia executive director Von Hernandez also attacked the Aquino administration and Senator Sergio Osmeña III for using them as scapegoats for the daily eight-hour blackouts in Mindanao, saying the residents there were being blackmailed into accepting higher electricity rates, coal-fired plants and power barges.

Palmones criticized Mr. Aquino for reversing the supposed gains made by the previous administration in stamping out the insurgency and luring investors to Mindanao.

He also accused Osmeña of distorting the truth when he claimed that former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo bowed to “populist demands” and granted a 10-year exemption to the privatization of the Agus-Pulangui plants and ordered the cost of power lowered to lift her sagging popularity.

“The peace and order problem was a serious concern in Mindanao. No businessman would want to risk putting up businesses in conflict-stricken areas coupled with high power costs expected from privatization,” Palmones said.

“The strategy worked. Banana, pineapple, rubber and palm plantations started sprouting, jobs were generated, and the people sympathetic to the cause of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and the Abu Sayyaf abandoned the insurgents that made them marginalized.

“Mindanao was already doing a roadshow, showing off goods such as fruits and other agricultural and livestock products to lure more investments.

“But these gains were reversed by the administration by reviving the otherwise dormant and marginalized MILF when the President held secret talks with the isolated and marginalized group of Al Haj Murad in Tokyo last year.”

As a result, Palmones said, the bigger faction of the MILF retaliated by mounting a series of attacks on troops that resulted in the death of 19 soldiers in Zamboanga.

Casiño said the people were not buying Mr. Aquino’s claim that he merely inherited the power crisis and that he could do nothing to prevent oil and electricity rates from rising.

He said the Energy Regulatory Commission last week granted the National Power Corp. and Manila Electric Co. their petitions for a new round of power rate hikes starting May on top of the almost weekly oil price increases hitting consumers.

“The Aquino government has been in power for almost two years now. The question is, what have our officials done to correct the mistakes of the previous governments? It seems all they are doing is washing their hands and crying ‘I didn’t do that’,” Casiño said.

Hernandez, meanwhile, accused President Aquino of reneging on his campaign promise to phase out coal-fired power plants.

He said Mr. Aquino allowed the island’s cheapest source of renewable energy, the Agus-Pulangui hydroelectric plants, to deteriorate. That, he said, would force the public to accept more expensive electricity from the big power contractors using coal-fired plants and barges.

“The Aquino administration saw it coming but did nothing,” Hernandez told the Manila Standard.

“Now they are using us as scapegoat and they are using the energy crisis to blackmail Mindanao into accepting coal-fired power plants and power barges that would lock the country to dependence on dirty and harmful fossil fuels in the next 30 years.

“During his campaign for the presidency, President Aquino declared he is for the phase-out of coal power plants in the country. Unfortunately, he seems to have forgotten his promise, allowing the implementation of the Renewable Energy Law to drag on and letting the coal plant proposals get through left and right.”

Zubiri, the author of the Renewable Energy Act and the first to raise the alarm over the rolling blackouts in Mindanao, said the Energy Department sat on proposals for renewable energy projects for Davao, Cotabato, Surigao del Sur, Surigao del Norte, and Davao Oriental that could have covered the estimated 285-megawatt deficit by 2014.

Hernandez said the Energy Department and some pro-coal advocates and policy makers were using the crisis in Mindanao to justify the construction of coal-fired plants on the island.

The plants would take two or three years before they could produce power, and they would be very pollutive once they did.

Senator Edgardo Angara agreed, saying the current crisis could have been mitigated if the policymakers had not fiddled with renewable energy initiatives and driven away private investors, who were ready to invest up to P5 billion.

“If we didn’t take too much time debating, then substantial investments in renewable energy would have been put in place two years ago, and by this time, the country would have reduced its reliance on expensive imported energy and the people would not be facing crippling outages in Mindanao and parts of the Visayas,” Angara said in an interview over DzBB.

He also blamed the “cowardly” Finance Department officials who worried so much about losing revenue that they eventually drove investors to Thailand, Cambodia and Indonesia.

Also over the weekend, an economist of the Bank of the Philippine Islands said Mindanao could lose more investment opportunities and its prospects for growth if the power crisis was not resolved soon.

Electricity, said BPI economist Jun Neri, was a major component in the food processing, fishing and canning industries.

“Supply bottlenecks, even minor ones, can cause a lot of disruptions,” he said.

“Supply disruptions not only reduce potential production output but could also push prices higher.” –Christine F. Herrera with John Anthony Concepcion and Elaine Ramos Alanguilan, Manila Standard Today