Petty power ploys

When we last heard talk about a power crisis, we heard it from the secretary of the Department of Energy (DOE). As such, what talk should have behind it the credibility of a Cabinet official and the backing of a whole department to which billions are entrusted. Had the talk been substantiated, it might have been believed. It wasn’t.

The talk was reckless and unfounded. Officials predicted that, last March 2 through to April this year, Luzon would be plunged into power outages not seen since the Corazon Aquino administration, when rolling blackouts stretched for as long as 12 hours as the economy ground to a halt.

The Chicken Little panic talk of debilitating outages had to do with the scheduled maintenance of the Malampaya gas fields that feed the Luzon grid through a couple of gas-fired base load power plants.

These plants would then have to operate on either more expensive fuels or completely shut down and deprive the Luzon grid enough capacities to cause outages. For the gullible, the tale made sense.

For opportunists, it made money sense. Money can be made from pricing scarce supplies in the face of overwhelming demand. And money can also be made from overpricing and commissions where the industrious conspire to fleece a panicked public. After all, crises compel crisis pricing. Because Luzon’s energy reserves continue occasionally to fall below requisite levels, players can influence supply and, thus, manipulate pricing. Economists call it market abuse.

Crisis pricing justifies extraneous margins and veritably tips the scales where demand is everything while supply falls to zero. A case in point is the recent blackout scare inflicted on the Luzon electricity franchise area. Fortunately, the feared debilitating blackouts these energy officials had warned us would cripple our economy if we did not accede to emergency powers and allow the blind release of millions in emergency funds did not happen. At least, not in the scale their hyperbole construed.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the rest of the country outside the Luzon franchise. Let us look at the data.

In Cebu, repairs on the Cebu Electric Cooperative Compostela-Liloan-Consolacion 69-kilovolt transformer line created nine-hour outages simply because the lines did not have redundancy systems. The rotating outages hit large parts of Cebu City, Mandaue City, Talisay City, the City of Naga and the town of Minglanilla, with some outages as long as 13 hours.

Recently, outages hit central Negros from May 23 to June 3, blacking out Bacolod, Bago, Salvador Benedicto, Talisay, Silay, and the municipality of Murcia.

Outside the Meralco franchise area, Isabela experienced 10-hour brownouts on April 23, while 11-hour outages hit Kalinga and Mountain Province. On May 19, several Cagayan Valley towns were hit by 10-hour brownouts while outages lasting 12 hours blacked out several towns in Cagayan.

Last April, widespread seven to nine-hour outages hit Davao City, Davao del Norte, Davao Oriental, Agusan, General Santos City, Zamboanga City, Cagayan de Oro, Bukidnon, Surigao City, North Cotabato, South Cotabato, Sultan Kudarat, Maguindanao and Cotabato City, while outages hit Cagayan de Oro, Pagadian City, Lanao del Norte, Bukidnon and Zamboanga City.

The causes of each are totally unrelated to the Malampaya maintenance shutdown that officials claim necessitated emergency powers and extraneous billion-peso funding. These outages were created by the dereliction and incompetence of the energy hierarchy. Precious years were wasted. All throughout the Aquino administration, officials pussyfooted, “noynoyed” and failed to establish adequate generating infrastructure.

Unfortunately, they’ve found lower depths to sink to. Energy officials are now relying on the outages that their ineptitude created to depict themselves as electorally relevant. Today, on TV, radio and print, to remain in the public consciousness, the politically ambitious have resorted to useless and nonsensical self-promoting advertisements using millions of energy funds to purchase media space.

Much like March’s contrived crisis, this one’s clearly a petty power ploy.