COTABATO CITY—The Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao’s island provinces of Basilan, Sulu and Tawi-Tawi (BaSulTa) will soon see a stable supply of electricity after an Indonesian-Indian firm decided to make available a P400-million eight-megawatt diesel-fed power barge in each of the three areas, an ARMM official said.
Lawyer Ishak Mastura, the chairman of the Regional Board of Investments, said the Kaltimex Rural Energy Corp., known for its experience in providing power in off-grid islands in Indonesia, will initially put up the diesel-fed power barge in Tawi-Tawi after securing a power purchase agreement from the Tawi-Tawi Electric Cooperative.
Mastura said the “project will later expand its electric power capacity through co-generation with a solar power plant,” adding that Kaltimex will also establish a similar project in Sulu and Basilan even as he stressed that the company’s investment strategy “is to provide services in off-grid and isolated island electric power markets or small power utilities groups in southern Philippines.”
The regional BoI chairman noted that BaSulTa suffers from perennial brownouts in many of its areas, and it is “literally gripped by darkness because electricity coverage is sporadic with some localities having no access at all to electric power.”
He claimed that “even if there is electricity in some parts of BaSulTa, there is a long-running energy deficit due to lack of additional power generation capacity and dilapidated equipment, causing them to suffer from regular brownouts.”
Stressing that electric power access brings social, economic and technical benefits to residents, Mastura said the Kaltimex project seeks to improve “the dire situation in ARMM’s island provinces in terms of human and economic development.”