SAN PEDRO CITY—Arturo Muros, a resident of Ferol, Romblon province, recently had to rush his wife to a government hospital in his town. But even during an emergency, the health care facility was not spared from the frequent power interruption on the island.
“Fortunately, that hospital has a generator,” Muros said. “Not every hospital here has one.”
Muros, an employee at the Ferol municipal government, said they started experiencing brownouts on Tablas Island in May. Tablas is one of the three major islands of Romblon where 70 percent of the province’s population resides. The island also houses government offices, trade centers and higher education institutions.
Muros said electricity would go out for a number of hours in a day at a “very unpredictable” interval, affecting the local economy since most businesses and beach resorts have no generator sets.
“Whenever there’s no electricity, the tendency of the employees is also to stay outside their offices,” he added.
This is one of the reasons the local power distributor, Tablas Island Electric Cooperative Inc. (Tielco), is looking forward to having Department of Energy (DOE) Secretary Jericho Petilla in their annual meeting on June 27.
Dennis Alag, Tielco’s general manager, said they wanted Petilla to see for himself “the critical situation” of Tablas, referring to the power shortfall that prompted the rotating brownouts in all nine Tablas municipalities.
In a phone interview on Wednesday, he said the five-to-six hour daily blackouts result from the limited power supply being generated by the state-subsidized National Power Corp.’s-Small Power Utilities Group (Napocor-SPUG).
Tielco and Napocor have been operating in Odiongan town in Tablas for the last 27 years. But Napocor-SPUG only generates 4.8 megawatts, against the island’s demand (with 35,000 households) of 5.9 MW.
“A difference of 1.1 MW is a lot,” Alag said. “We have to alternate. If there’s power on one side of the island, we have to turn it off on the other.”
While power consumption normally rises during the dry season, Tielco always sees a problem with Napocor’s power generation capacity.