Aquino aide says hydropower income is wasted

DAVAO CITY—President Aquino’s top aide in Mindanao continued to defend government ownership of two hydropower plants that supply half of the island’s electricity, saying some power sector officials are hiding the fact that income from the plants was being used to pay for losses that government incurred in operating diesel and coal power generators.

Officials of the Power Sector Assets and Liabilities Management (Psalm) had said the Agus hydroelectric complex in the two Lanao provinces and Pulangi hydroelectric plant in Bukidnon have been losing billions of pesos.

But Luwalhati Antonino, Mr. Aquino’s chief aide in Mindanao, said Psalm failed to reveal that income from the hydropower plants was actually defraying the costs of operating the government’s other power facilities like diesel plants in Iligan City and the coal-powered Steag AG plant in Misamis Oriental.

Emmanuel Ledesma Jr., Psalm president, had been quoted as saying the government lost up to P15 billion from 2001 to 2011 by operating the Agus and Pulangi hydropower plants that supply up to 55 percent of Mindanao’s electricity.

Antonino, armed with copies of financial statements of Psalm and the National Power Corp. (Napocor), said on the contrary, the hydropower facilities earned P68 billion, or an annual average of P6 billion, during the same period.

“It is not pure allegation that Agus and Pulangi are net income earners,” said Antonino. “These are backed by financial records of Napocor and Psalm.”

What the hydropower plants earn, however, is being used to cover for the losses of other government-owned power plants in Mindanao, said Antonino.

These plants, she said, incurred losses of at least P83 billion from 2001-2011. The government used income from the hydropower plants to bring the other plants’ losses down to P15.03 billion, said Antonino.

Instead of selling the hydropower plants to the private sector, Antonino said what government should do is privatize its other plants that are losing money.

One of these plants, she said, is a 210-megawatt coal-fired facility in Misamis Oriental, known as Steag AG, which was a build-operate-transfer project that had been turned over to the government in 2007.

Government paid at least P1 billion a year since 2007 until this year for Steag AG, said Antonino, quoting her documents.

“If Psalm used up every centavo earned by Agus and Pulangi to subsidize these losing Napocor assets, then it should have not allowed the hydroplants to deteriorate,” Antonino said.

She said if government had used the hydropower plants’ income for maintenance and repairs, the plants could be generating power at 100 percent, instead of 65 percent, of their capacities.

“Psalm’s statement cunningly presented half truths by stressing only losses, but not how Agus and Pulangi saved billions of pesos of government money,” Antonino said. Germelina Lacorte, Inquirer Mindanao