Despite the rolling power outages across Luzon, no looming power crisis will hit the country, said Energy Secretary Alfonso Cusi, underscoring the urgency to cut its processes like the need for 122 signatures for approval of new power plants.
Appearing at the initial hearing of the Senate energy committee into the simultaneous brownouts in Luzon, Cusi gave assurances there was enough reserve for a steady power supply.
Cusi said several plants are running and there is enough reserve to ensure there is no power crisis.
Due to simultaneous maintenance shutdowns and technical glitches of several power plants, rolling brownouts hit Luzon in the last week of July and the first week of August.
Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman Jose Vicente Salazar told the committee the outages were due to several technical problems at the Luzon power plants, including leakages in boilers, defective parts, and low water level in the case of hydroelectric power plants.
He said the forced outages happened simultaneously with maintenance shutdowns of several plants that had to delay such checks to ensure a steady supply of power during the May elections.
To further improve the energy supply, Cusi told the Senate panel chaired by Senator Sherwin Gatchalian there was need to fix its application process to fast-track the entry of new power players.
Under the current system, he said the application for a power plant requires 122 signatures for approval.
“First, our permitting has to improve because there are a lot of applications. We have to make permitting a lot easier and really improve the process,” Cusi said.
Cusi said the Department of Energy is still reviewing the possibility of lengthening a permit’s validity, in line with President Rodrigo Duterte’s goal of cutting red tape in government.
“We have to institutionalize the permitting as mandated by President Duterte. He doesn’t want any permits to be taking too long because of the number of agencies involved,” Cusi said.
Gatchalian said there is a strong need to define the processes well to expedite the building of new power plants. He warned of a continuous shortage in power supply if no new players would come in.
“We can see that it takes three to four years to build a power plant. Red tape adds another year, so if it takes three to four years for just one power plant, that’s years. If it takes us five years to build power plants, we will really be short on supply,” said Gatchalian.
He said there’s a lot of room for improvement and it will be up front with the Secretary that the process should be improved and the energy department’s technical capability.
Gatchalian said: “We found out earlier that there’s also the lack of manpower. If there’s a need for an audit, the manpower is lacking. They still need to outsource the audit of the plants’ technical compliance.
“Second, the time frame like this auditing, should be fast; we also found out that the time frame was not clear to us that’s why we need to also improve on the time frame when you conduct audits.”
He also said red tape marred the processing of permits that would need almost 200 signatures just to build a power plant.
“There should be improvement, legislation wise [and] policy wise, and I think this is about time to work together with the good secretary,” Gatchalian said.
When questioned how much power supply the country needs in the next 15 years, Cusi gave an estimate of over 10,000 megawatts.
He said the maintenance shutdowns of power plants, which prompted the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines to place the Luzon grid on yellow and red alerts, have no significant impact on electricity rates.
