NPC plan to cut Mindanao power to 50% to kill business - Business Mirror

CAGAYAN DE ORO CITY—Electric cooperatives in Mindanao are questioning the National Power Corp.’s (NPC) plan to further reduce their power allocation to only about 50 percent or less.

At the same time, the Association of Mindanao Rural Electric Power Cooperatives (Amreco) urged the National Bureau of Investigation  and the Joint Congressional Power Commission to separately investigate the National Grid Corp.of the Philippines (NGCP) for possibly contriving the power crisis in Mindanao. They suspect it is “artificial” and is meant to justify a move to increase power rates.

Sergio Dagooc, Amreco president, said many of their members were angered when NPC officials announced at a recent meeting here  than it planned to further cut back the power allocation of power cooperatives to just 50 percent or less.

“Imagine the implications of this move. This means that 50 percent of revenues from power consumers will be gone. If our co-op’s load is reduced, it will also reduce, more or less, the load of every electric co-op, every private power company, even that of industrial customers,” Dagooc, also general manager of the Misamis Oriental Electric Cooperative, said.

“For example, if I have a condom factory, to make my condoms, my machines must run on more than 1 megaWatt. Below that, the machines won’t. The same thing with a rice mill. How can the machines mill rice or corn if these only run on 50-percent reduced power?” Dagooc, who manages the Siargao Island Rural Electric Cooperative and the Dinagat Island Rural Electric Cooperative, added.

Dagooc stressed it was not just a simple issue of cutting off power.

“This is more seriously an issue of revenue reduction in the long run. How will our cooperatives pay for the salaries of co-op employees if our product or service is reduced to half?” he asked.

He said the power crisis in Mindanao has negatively impacted the economy of the island.

He echoed suspicions the power crisis is contrived. “Some sectors might be manipulating the events to cause an artificial crisis,” he said, adding that power cooperatives were informed last October that the power-supply shortage would peak and be felt in 2014 yet, due to load growth that could no longer be supported by the present power generators.

“The last annual update we had from the National Power Corp. and the now-defunct National Transmission Corp. [Transco] stated that the power crisis in Mindanao would occur in the year 2014,” he said.

The Transco has since been replaced by the NGCP following its privatization in 2008. B. Fabe