Puno urges Palace to probe Saturday’s blackout

Opposition senatorial candidate Ricardo "Dong" Puno Jr. is calling on Malacañang to conduct a full-dress probe of Saturday’s power outage that hit Metro Manila and most of Luzon.

Puno said the Palace should pry into the real cause of the outage, which is the third such island-wide blackout in less than two years.

"This should also serve as a wake-up call for government to take a long hard look at renewable energy sources as a way to minimize our dependence on dollar-draining and environment-unfriendly fuel as the country’s main power source," said Puno, a former press secretary and presidential spokesman.

"Malacañang should see the green light," Puno said. "It’s about time we chart a future for green energy like solar, wind and wave power."

Saturday’s power outage was the third blackout on Luzon after jellyfish supposedly clogged a power plant reservoir in Pangasinan in December 1999 and a transmission line fault caused a power outage in October last year.

The probe should also look into the claim of the National Power Corp. that rampant theft of its aluminum high-voltage cables in remote areas where its transmission lines pass through made the lines prone to tripping, Puno said.

"Government should go beyond the rhetoric of environmentalism and start taking decisive measures to integrate green energy into our power systems," he added.