Manila Electric Co. reiterated its commitment to powering up countryside by establishing joint venture agreements with electric cooperatives (ECs) and push Philippine economy to become globally competitive.
Meralco’s joint venture efforts are underway in Batangas and Pampanga, where the utility holds an existing management contract.
Meralco senior vice president and chief external and government affairs officer Arnel Casanova said at The Monday Circle, a bi-monthly breakfast roundtable discussing economic and business landscape, the company’s nation-building mission which includes uplifting the lives of Filipinos and driving economic progress should not only involves its current franchise areas but also in the rural parts of the country.
“We’d like to emphasize that our objective really is to make the Philippines competitive in the global economy particularly in the context of becoming digital. [For example] when it comes to food security, we need power for cold storage. When it comes to healthcare, we need power for hospitals to operate very well, and of course, for the quality of life of the people and for businesses to thrive,” Casanova said.
Meralco is expanding its services and coverage areas in order for this mission to succeed and achieve milestones.
“Many Filipinos think that Meralco is all over the country. The truth is we actually only cover 3 percent of the entire land area. But within that 3 percent of the land area within Meralco’s franchise, we distribute 55 percent of the entire country’s power supply. This means also that the businesses, 55 percent also of the GDP, is being produced within that 3 percent of land area,” Casanova said.
“If you look at the economic data, you will see that the GDP per capita of Filipinos within the Meralco franchise is about P500,000 per annum. Yet, in the rest of the country outside the Meralco franchise, the average GDP per capita of Filipino is about P150,000 to P200,000 only per annum. That’s a very big gap between those within the Meralco franchise and those outside the Meralco franchise and being served by the electric cooperatives,” he said.
“That’s also the reason why you may observe that our economy is comprised and driven mostly by services, simply because the industries and manufacturing were crowding within the Meralco franchise and could not move out to the countryside,” said Casanova.
One of the persistent challenges that hamper economic progress in the countryside is the lack of reliable and stable supply of electricity resulting in power fluctuation and frequent brownouts, he said.
“That reflects why the countryside is poor. We literally lack power,” Casanova said.
He said Meralco chairman Manuel Pangilinan gave him and his team the mission “for Meralco to reach out to electric cooperatives and private distribution utilities all over the country so that we could provide reliable and affordable power nationwide.”
With the proposed joint ventures to ECs, Meralco is set to lend its size, economies of scale, technological capability and advancement to improve electricity services to Filipino consumers.
“We want to uplift the lives of the people for the entire country so that we may be able to build industries [such as] cold storage for our farmers and industries for our engineers,” he said.
Casanova said establishing joint venture agreements is all about partnership and empowering the ECs and not a takeover.
“We have no intent of taking over the electric cooperatives. What we want to do is basically to empower them and also to upgrade the skills of the employees of the electric cooperatives who have been serving our people in the countryside,” he said.
Casanova noted that on a technical industry like power distribution, there is a need to retain the employment of and upskill capable linemen and electrical engineers.
The proposed joint ventures will also empower member consumers as part-owners and shareholders through the option of ECs becoming a stock corporation as stated in the EPIRA (Electric Power Industry Reform Act) Law. This is seen as a trailblazing path being taken by Meralco.
Meralco sees a future with increased demand for more power that is not only evident in key cities but also in rural Philippines especially in today’s digital landscape.
“The quality of life has really improved when electricity came and we’ve seen this happen as the rural electrification moved on over the decades. Now, almost 95-98 percent of our countryside are already energized residentially but we are now in the era of digitalization and artificial intelligence,” he said.
“The industries and everything else are driven by electricity because it has gone digital. And more so in the future—in the coming years, because with the momentum and the speed that artificial intelligence has impacted our lives, we believe that eventually artificial intelligence is going to be a part of our lifestyle in the same way that our tablets and our cell phones and social media have become part of it. So much more power is demanded,” he said.
Meralco, on its 121st year of service, is the largest private sector electric distribution company in the Philippines covering 39 cities and 72 municipalities with 8 million customers.
