Velasco: DOE, ERC treat power plants, gencos with kid gloves

House energy panel chairperson and Marinduque lawmaker Lord Allan Velasco on Tuesday called out the Department of Energy (DOE) and the Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) over their apparent failure to penalize power plants and power generation companies over the spate of red and yellow alerts.

“We always have a power supply problem and we need to fix this. We are investigating red and yellow alerts every year. [And] every time there are red and yellow alerts, power rates go up. It comes to mind, year in, year out, there are power interruptions. At the back of our minds, wait, it appears that someone is profiting from this,” Velasco said during the House probe into recent red and yellow alerts.

“When a generation company says they can provide 100 megawatts and such a commitment is delayed, shouldn’t there be a penalty imposed on them? Because otherwise, they will just keep on delaying,” he added.

ERC officials responded by citing that the amendments on fines and penalties for all violations of the Electric Power Industry Reform Act Law and ERC rules, including Certificate of Compliance (COC), rules remain pending.

During the same probe, the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) submitted a position paper that the 226 out of 234 system yellow and red alerts from 2016 to 2023, or 96.6%, are mainly caused by power generation companies’ unplanned or emergency shutdowns.

Luzon and Visayas were placed on yellow and red alerts on April 16 after several power plants went on planned and unplanned shutdown.

NGCP also said that 90% of power plants during that time went on unplanned shutdown, while only 10 were on planned outages.

Consumer group Kuryente.org’s national convenor Bas Umali, for his part, said the DOE should come up with solutions aside from asking consumers to save energy. — BM, GMA Integrated News