By Henrylito D. Tacio
Leila Noel left the Philippines when her hometown Bansalan, as small town in Davao del Sur, did not have electricity yet.
“This was in the late 1970s when the country had to grapple with the oil crisis,” she recalls. “I practically grew up without electricity. When I was in high school, I remember using the kerosene lamp while studying. It seemed to be a way of life then.”
In 1980, she met and married Wim Rispens, a Dutch national whom she met in the Netherlands. The two were blessed with two kids, and when she brought them to her hometown, there was still no electricity.
“It was only in the 1990s that Bansalan started to have good supply of electricity,” the Senior Adviser at the International Network of Alternative Financial Institutions and founder of Wimler Foundation said, adding that technology also came simultaneously with electricity.
“It was a great relief and delight when many homes finally had electricity. It propelled economy. People were able to watch television programs, have their own refrigerators and other amenities, which make life simpler.”
Looking back, she cannot help but compare her life in the Netherlands, where she stayed for thirty years, to her life in the Philippines.
“Throughout my stay in the Netherlands, I can only remember a few times when there was a power outage,” she says. “It happens only when the government is conducting routine electrical checkup, constructing roads or when it renews electrical wiring. There were also instances during severe typhoons when a few street lamp posts would fell.”
Three years ago, the Rispens couple decided to retire in Bansalan. That was when she learned that life is really different from what she used to have in the Netherlands.
“Since we arrived here in Bansalan, I remember there were only a few days without electricity,” Rispens-Noel discloses. “But summer is different; we had several hours without electricity and most of the time it happened during night time. Modern life is now highly dependent on electricity. In this town, if there is no electricity, there is also no water as the pump is dependent on electricity. And since we rely so much on electricity, we cannot use computers after the batteries ran out.”
The problem of power shortage has been with us since the 1990s.
In a lecture convened by the Press Foundation of Asia for community journalists in 1994, then undersecretary of the Department of Energy Rufino Bomasang aptly said: “Our shortage of electricity is real, serious problem that we cannot downplay. But if we focus exclusively on it, we run the risk of seeing just the trees and not the forest.”
On March 6, 2016, Business Mirror carried this headline: “Mindanao in darkness again.”
Manuel T. Cayon, who penned the report, wrote: “Several places in Mindanao have been advised to brace themselves for another dark weekend, as two coal plants on the island were expected to go off the Mindanao grid.”
In Davao City, the Davao Light and Power Company explained that the power shortage was “due to the unstable power supply in Mindanao caused by the decreasing water elevation of major hydro power plants caused by the El Niño phenomenon and the bombings of the NGCP (National Grid Corp. of the Philippines) transmission lines.”
Several people, especially businessmen, complain of the lack of electricity in the city. Most of the small-scale businesses said that they have already huge amount because of the rotating brownouts.
But what is currently being felt is just the beginning.
“Rotating power interruptions is projected to continue until summer,” the Davao Light said in a press statement. “New generating plants in Mindanao, which Davao Light has contracted additional power supply, are said to be available in May and August 2016.”
Summer is just around the corner and people are advised to brace themselves.
“Power outage is a great setback for the development in Mindanao,” Rispens-Noel deplores. “Economic progress is dependent on adequate supplies of electricity. For as long as this problem is not addressed sooner, we cannot expect some robust economic activities in this region.”
But Mindanao is the not the only facing the dilemma. It is happening in other parts of the country.
“Two challenges face us in the energy sector in this country,” Bomasang said. “A short-term challenge is to be able to address this power shortage once and for all. The longer-term challenge is to find a solution to our continuing dependence on imported energy.”
Renewable energy seems to be the answer. In the keynote speech during the Forum on Making Renewable Energy a Vehicle of Inclusive Growth, Senator Loren Legarda pointed this out: “We are a country rich in renewable energy, the amount of sun and wind is more than enough to power our entire country many times over, and we must take greater steps to harness these abundant natural resources to ensure a sustainable future.”
According to Legarda, the major forms of renewable energy being utilized in the country today are geothermal, hydro, biomass, solar and wind. Ocean energy is also currently being developed, although not yet in use.
Based on the estimates of the Department of Energy, the country’s untapped renewable energy resources are as follows: 5.1 kilowatt-hour per square meter per day for solar, 13,097 megawatts for hydropower, 2,600 megawatts for geothermal, 70,000 megawatts for wind, and 170,000 megawatts for ocean.
“We toil today to provide a brighter future for our children,” Legarda stressed. “But that future can be bleak, dark and dirty if we go business as usual, if we continue to burn fossil fuels, if we continue to believe that coal is cheap, if we continue to rely on oil to fuel our needs.”
As a developing nation, the Philippines needs more energy. “Growth is difficult to imagine without energy; and energy that does not take into consideration the needs of future generations can only destroy and not build,” Legarda said. “Development, progress, and quality of life cannot be the exclusive domain of a few.”
As such, Legarda suggested the development of more renewable energy sources. “It has been found that renewables, as opposed to fossil fuel industries such as coal, often produce higher-value, better paying, cleaner, healthier jobs. With hundreds of thousands of untapped renewable energy resources and the legal framework to develop renewable energy in the Philippines, renewable energy is sure to create thousands of good jobs for Filipinos.” — (Next: The untapped source of power)
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