Congress closer to giving Aquino emergency powers

Oriental Mindoro Rep. Reynaldo Umali. INQUIRER.net FILE PHOTO

MANILA, Philippines–Congress has moved closer to approving a joint resolution vesting President Aquino with emergency powers to avert the anticipated acute power shortage in next year’s summer months.

The draft resolution pegged the projected power shortage at 700 megawatts for 16 weeks from March to July 2015 with brownouts expected to occur one hour per day per week on the average.

The resolution also identified three main measures to address the power crisis:

— Procurement of additional generation capacity before March next year;

— Sourcing additional power from private generation set owners in the Interruptible Load Program (ILP), interconnection of power plans, and speeding up construction of new power plants; and

— Adoption of energy conservation measures such as forcing government agencies to convert to LED lighting, air conditioners using inverter technology, and retrofit with solar energy in their buildings.

Oriental Mindoro Rep. Rey Umali said he and his joint energy committee cochair, Sen. Sergio Osmena III, were “on the same page” in the draft resolution authorizing the President to exercise his special powers in addressing the power crisis under the Electric Power Industry Reform Act (Epira). The joint resolution is targeted for signing next month.

But Energy Secretary Jericho Petilla attended Wednesday’s House energy committee hearing to dispel the National Grid Corp. of the Philippines’ efforts to downplay the severity of next year’s crisis. “They say we don’t see a problem. I tell you there is a problem,” said Petilla.

Petilla explained that the NGCP’s forecast outage of 667 megawatts was based purely on projections and not actual outages that the country experienced this year.

Petilla explained that the actual outage might have averaged 667 megawatts per month but there were days when the power shortfall would reach a peak of 1,800 megawatts and 800 megawatts for several days. Petilla said these figures were only for March this year and he said he was “too scared” to cite data for this year’s summer months.