Mindanao power plants need rehab, not privatization – partylist reps

DAVAO CITY, Philippines – Malacañang should see to the rehabilitation of power plants in Mindanao that are still under government control instead of pushing for their privatization, lawmakers belonging to the militant Bayan Muna partylist group said Tuesday.

Representative Carlos Zarate said it was bad enough that the government was hardly doing anything to keep these plants running smoothly and yet it has been actively pushing for their sale to the private sector.

The worst part, he said, was that Malacañang has been telling Mindanaoans that the power problem would continue unless the private sector stepped in.

“While we in Mindanao are suffering from long hours of rotating brownouts, even blackouts, it is unacceptable that the Aquino administration will just tell us to expect even more power outages until 2015 while it is still aggressively pushing its failed privatization policy,” Zarate, a native of Davao City, said in a statement e-mailed to various news offices by the Bayan Muna party.

He said even the idea of privatizing the power plants was bad because it had been proven that privatization would increase the cost of electricity several times over.

“With the growing evidence now that the Epira-dictated privatization policy is a failure, all the more that we save and preserve the state’s remaining generation assets for the benefit of the people,” Zarate said.

He said this was the same reason he and fellow Bayan Muna Rep. Neri Javier Colmenares filed House Bill No. 351, which seeks the exemption of the Agus and the Pulangui complexes from privatization along with the Angat Hydroelectric Power plant in Luzon and the Naga Power Plant complex in the Visayas.

“All state power barges shall be excluded from privatization. Their ownership shall be retained or transferred to the (National Power Corp.) and shall continue to be operated by the Napocor,” the bill says.

“If President  Aquino is truly concerned with the interest of the people, he should certify these measures that save our remaining power assets as urgent, particularly for us in Mindanao” he said.

Both Zarate and Colmenares said the “vital power industry should not be left to the vagaries of private interests to the detriment of our country’s national development requirements.”

Mindanao was hit by a massive power outage last week whose cause has not been fully explained.

Zarate and Colmenares said it appeared the power outage was staged so that government could force implementation of the Interim Mindanao Electricity Market (Imem), “a clone of the dreaded Wholesale Electricity Spot Market (WESM) in Luzon that caused power rates to spike last November and December, making Meralco seek a P4.15 power rate hike in December and another P5.33 hike in January,” they said in the Bayan Muna statement.

Zarate and Colmenares said Imem could even be worse than the electricity market in Luzon, which operates amid limited power supply.

“Imem will be operating in Mindanao where there is an acute power shortage. This will definitely lead to even higher prices, with power generators having a heyday manipulating the spot market,” they said.

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