POLOMOLOK, South Cotabato, Philippines – Intermittent brownouts hit parts of Mindanao at random daily because many of the hydro-electric power plants that supply 80 percent of Mindanao’s electricity have started to bog down due to heavy silting and old age. Privatization is also expected to take its toll as electricity rates become more expensive as new owners try to recover huge investments in rehabilitating these plants.
“The power cooperative began looking for new sources of electricity after the entire island of Mindanao experienced half-day power outages in the summer of 2010 due to the El Niño phenomenon which depleted the hydroelectric power sources that supply more than half of Mindanao’s electrical capacity. Customers of Socoteco 2 experienced daily power outages averaging nine hours a day from March to April 2010,” Socoteco 2 general manager Rodolfo G. Ocat said.
Residents of Tupi and Polomolok towns in South Cotabato noted these conditions as they expressed support for the power supply agreement that Socoteco 2 secured from the Alcantara Group’s Sarangani Energy Corp. (SEC) which requires the power company to supply 70 percent of the erlectricity from its first 100-megawatt coal-fired thermal power plant in Alabel, Sarangani exclusively to Socoteco 2’s one-million residential and business customers.
Ocat noted that in a letter dated Aug. 10, 2011, the state-owned National Power Corp. informed Socoteco 2’s management that due to the uncertainty of the power situation in Mindanao, it could not commit to provide SOCOTECO 2 with the agreed upon allocation of power supply.
He disclosed that from Socoteco 2’s current requirement of 100,000 kilowatts, Napocor could now only allocate an average of 72,900 kilowatts per hour to the power cooperative. Socoteco 2 anticipates that the Napocor will further reduce power allocation due to continued privatization of Napocor assets and rising demand in Mindanao, thus ensuring daily brownouts to occur in ther region by 2014.
Earlier, residents of the municipalities of Alabel, Malapatan, and Glan in Sarangani province also threw their support for the power sales agreement with SEC.
Bonifacio Alegre, a resident of Alabel, said Socoteco 2 ensured their town would not go through the daily brownouts predicted in 2014 for the rest of Mindanao because of its initiative to negotiate a power sales agreement with power producers.
Rex Machan, president of the barangay secretary’s association of Polomolok, turned over to SOCOTECO 2 a report from a Mindanao energy forum conducted by the Golden State College of General Santos and the UP Los Banos College of Economics and Management Alumni Foundation, calling for the establishment of stable power generation sources for Mindanao.