President Aquino urged to shut down geothermal power plant

BACOLOD CITY—Environmentalists and members of the clergy urged President Aquino and other government officials to shut down permanently the operations of the Northern Negros Geothermal Power Plant (NNGPP) in Barangay Mailum, Bago City.

They also sought the return of Mt. Kanlaon Natural Park (MKNP) to the people.

The call was made during a press conference at the Bishop’s House in Bacolod City on Thursday after Energy Development Corp. (EDC) officials announced on Wednesday that the P8-billion NNGPP would stop operations in July for further study of the plant’s geothermal resources.

The NNGPP, which sells its generated power to the Iloilo Electric Cooperative (Ileco) at P4.72 per kilowatt hour, has a projected capacity of 49 megawatts but has only been able to produce 8 MW to 9 MW of geothermal power.

Negros Occidental Gov. Alfredo Marañon Jr. on Thursday said he doubted that the Bago plant could be shut down easily since a huge amount of money had been invested in it.

He said he would look into the claim of Andrea Si, a convenor of the Save Mt. Kanlaon Coalition (SMKC), that EDC had entered the protected area through the underground.

Underground drilling
The EDC has built its well pads in the buffer zone 15 meters from the MKNP protected area, which enabled the company to enter one and a half kilometers of the MKNP protected area through underground directional drilling, Si maintained.

The environmentalist and members of the clergy also called on the President to listen to the voice of Negrenses and halt further environmental abuse and destruction at the Mt. Kanlaon Natural Park by EDC.

In a position paper, the SMKC and the Negros Environment said they were appalled that the geothermal project has cut down thousands of endangered forest trees, destroyed and dislocated countless wild flora and fauna, contaminated with toxic effluents upland waterways and permanently altered the landscape and territorial boundaries of the MKNP.

They appealed to the President to order the energy and environment secretaries to put a stop to the operations of the geothermal plant. The two groups also asked the members of Congress, especially those from Negros Occidental, to scrap or amend Republic Act No. 9154, or the Mt. Kanlaon Natural Park Law, according to Edwin Balajadia of the SMKC group.

Si maintained that the MKNP Law was not a product of a participatory process and is illegal.

They also sought a comprehensive audit of the money spent on the Bago plant while it was under the Philippine National Oil Co.–Energy Development Corp. The EDC has since been purchased by the Lopez-owned First Gen.