Foundation urges power conservation

"Our people must begin thinking of conserving electricity before the power crisis catches up with us," said lawyer-advocate Patrick Velez, president of the Foundation for National Development (FND).

"With eight-hour brownouts reported from the Visayas, specifically Capiz, and frequent outages in Aklan, the unwanted power crisis is not ‘looming’ – it is here," added Velez, who pointed out that electricity consumers should start girding up for the return of brownouts."

The business community – local and foreign – has called the attention of government policy makers about the "lackluster interest" of investors to commit capital to build new power plants or to modernize power facilities because of "conflicting and upredictable economic policies," noted Velez.

"It’s simply basic economics that you tamper with or suppress prices, you will end up with shortages," he pointed out. "We are reaping the poisoned fruit of misguided populism with power outages happening right now in the Visayas – and very soon in Luzon."

"There seems to be no hope anymore with this administration which does not even respond to calls for more coherent policies that will encourage electric power companies to expand their facilities," Velez said. "Worse, judicial interference by the Supreme Court on purely economic matters has sent shudders up the spine of potential investors."

The FND chief said that since the power crisis is inevitable come 2006 or sooner in Luzon, "we might as well be prepared." He added: "We now have to change our mode of thinking from crisis prevention to crisis mitigation." The only way therefore is to think of creative ways to conserve electricity.

He recalled that the Foundation was the first to sound the alarm about the impending power crisis 10 months ago, especially when the Department of Energy is avoiding being the "bringer of bad news. "But because of the misguided populist bias of the country’s leaders, we are now at the precipice of a power crisis," he declared.