ENVIRONMENTALISTS and consumer advocates are currently busy fighting tooth and nail against the establishment of industries that they claim to be harmful to the environment and detrimental to the health and welfare of people.
Such a fight, albeit a bit lop-sided, was witnessed in the application of AboitizPower for a Davao City Council’s endorsement of an application to put up a coal-fired energy plant. Whether the oppositors shouted loud enough and pounded the table hard enough, did not seem to matter. On the other hand, the Council still has to consider AbotizPower’s next application, this time for the reclassification of the area from its non-conforming state to that of heavy industrial zone, fit for an establishment like a coal-fired plant. However, considering the overwhelming 23-1 vote for the coal-fired plant, its location’s reclassification is a forgone conclusion.
The other battle being waged by environmentalists and consumerists, whether genuine or fake panhandling militants, is over mining ventures which are beginning to engulf the country, mineral-rich Mindanao, especially.
To some consumer advocates, however, the next pitched battle should be over the government’s plan to privatize the Agus-Pulangi Hydroelectric Power Complexes (APHC). Unfortunately for oppositors, the privatization is mandated by the controversial EPIRA (Electric Power Industry Reform Act) of 2001.
Once the government loses the APHC to private companies, it will no longer have leverage against commercial abuse not uncommon among energy providers in this country. For the record, the country’s two power giants – Meralco, which has 4.5 million customers in Luzon, and Aboitiz in the Visayas and Mindanao – have been found by the Supreme Court to have illegally collected billions of pesos from their customers for years.
Meralco has been ordered to refund consumers P28 billion it illegally-collected from 1994 to 2002. The Aboitiz companies, on the other hand, were ordered by the Supreme Court in 2008 to refund the P308.425 million they over-collected from their customers from 1981 to 2006. Until now, both groups have yet to return the full amount to their overcharged customers.
It is clear that the operation of the Agus-Pulangi complexes by the government has kept the power rates in Mindanao lower than in Luzon and the Visayas. Privatizing APHC, therefore, would be a losing proposition as far as energy consumers are concerned. Our leaders in Mindanao should, therefore, ask Congress to revisit and amend the EPIRA Law with the end in view of incorporating a provision prohibiting privatization of the APHC.
