ON Friday, it was reported that President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. “ordered the Department of Energy (DOE) and other government agencies to normalize the power situation in the Visayas amid the series of outages in different areas in the past days.”
Well, thank you, Captain Obvious. I’m sure the DOE also appreciates your pointing out that there is a problem they may not have been aware was happening.
It never ceases to amaze me how often — it happens once or twice a week — the president of this country has to “order” some agency or other to do exactly the job they’re supposed to be doing. I know, it’s a political appearances thing; it is an easy way for the president to demonstrate to the public that he is aware of and concerned about current issues troubling the people, but from an outside perspective, it looks silly. Or worse, it gives the impression that the government machinery is so dysfunctional that it cannot carry out expected functions without being expressly told to do so by a higher authority.
I’m not picking on President Marcos, in particular. I actually like the guy, and I think he’s doing a decent job in most respects, all things considered. It is just that this is a weird political tradition in this country that is not particularly productive, and invokes feelings of secondhand embarrassment.
And he is not actually wrong in the general assessment that “doing something” about the power supply situation in the Visayas should be a critical priority, because the vast middle of the country simply does not have enough supply. The generation deficit across the Visayas is, depending on which source you consult, somewhere in the range of 1,500 to 2,000 megawatts (MW), and needs to gradually increase beyond that as the region grows.
Right now, total generating capacity is barely more than 1,000 MW above peak demand in the Visayas, and about 45 percent of the Visayas’ generation comes from renewable energy (RE). That’s great, but unless that variable RE can serve as baseload, mid-merit, or peaking capacity, available on short notice when demand spikes — which it can’t at its current state of development — the effect is a desperate shortfall of supply on the Visayas grid. Energy Secretary Sharon Garin admitted as much earlier in the week, when she told reporters that the Visayas’ effective surplus of RE was not helping the situation.
Fallacies
That brings us around to a couple of fallacies that emerged from President Marcos’ “directive” to the DOE, at least as explained by Malacañang mouthpiece Claire Castro. First of all, although the unavailability of three of the Visayas’ larger coal plants is obviously aggravating the situation, even if those were available, the fundamental capacity shortfall in the Visayas would still not be solved. I happen to know, at least in a general sense, why one of those plants is currently out of service — I will skip the details, because it was told to me in confidence — and it is because of a big, hairy mechanical issue that will take weeks, if not months, to fix; partly because it’s a big repair job, and partly because the parts and components, as well as the machine work involved, have to come from outside the country. The reason this particular plant is in this state is that the poor supply circumstances in the Visayas forced it to run harder than it should have. Although I don’t know the details of the other two plants involved, it is not an unreasonable assumption that they have similar circumstances.
So, beating up on the generation companies for plants being offline, which implies some kind of negligence on their part, is unfair. Remember, generation companies in this country are private businesses, and do generate revenue if they do not generate electricity that can be sold. There is absolutely no financial incentive for them whatsoever to not keep their equipment in peak operating condition and running as much as possible.
Second, the insinuation, which was part of Castro’s briefing to the media about the president’s “directive,” that the frequent power shortages in the Visayas are somehow the fault of the grid operator, the National Grid Corp. of the Philippines (NGCP), is also out of line. The NGCP cannot provide power to distributors if that power is not being generated in the first place, and while the NGCP is certainly not beyond fallibility, any shortcoming in its keeping up with various connection projects is not its fault, but rather that of a delayed and inefficient regulatory process. Recently (as in, a couple of months ago), the current Energy Regulatory Commission, led by lawyer Francis Saturnino Juan, finally caught up to approving the NGCP’s rate rebasing and capital expenditure plans.
Kudos to Juan for whipping his agency into shape and reducing its backlog of work, but the flip side of that is that the NGCP had something on the order of 200 projects approved all at once. Put that together with the limitations imposed by regulatory approval of how much the NGCP may spend on capital expenditures to get those projects done, and it creates a huge bottleneck. Just as the generation companies are private enterprises, so too is the NGCP, and it has no financial incentive to not complete as many connection projects as it can. But it is similarly forced to work within guardrails that are made narrower than they should be due to regulation, and unavoidably affected by technical and supply-chain complications.
For now, the DOE is proposing quick and dirty solutions to get the Visayas past the immediate crisis, including a 70-MW bunker-oil-fired power barge, a 20-MW modular diesel generator set, a 50-MW natural gas-fueled power barge, and at least 20 MW of additional battery energy storage systems. That might satisfy the president’s order to the DOE to “do something,” but it is, in a sense, the same kind of political window-dressing that order was in the first place. These are not long-term and sustainable solutions, and those kinds of solutions, ones that could be implemented quickly enough to make a real difference and finally resolve the problem, remain elusive.
ben.kritz@manilatimes.net
Bluesky: @benkritz.bsky.social
Website: www.badmannersgunclub.com
