Energy Secretary Alfonso Cusi said Thursday the government will take over Palawan Electric Cooperative within the month if the cooperative failed to resolve the province’s worsening power supply problem.
“I have given instructions, if Paleco will not shape up by the end of the month, I will take over. Remember what the President [Rodrigo Duterte] said,” Cusi said.
Duterte recently issued a stern warning to Paleco that the national government would be compelled to take over the power distributor’s facilities if frequent blackouts in Palawan persisted until the end of the year.
“NEA [National Electrification Administration] and the task force [will takeover]. I cannot afford service to be interrupted,” Duterte said.
Paleco which has the second largest franchise area in the country provides power to 18 municipalities and Puerto Princesa City, serving a total of 135,284 consumers as of April 2018.
Senator Sherwin Gatchalian previously backed the plan of the government to take over Paleco to resolve the province’s worsening power supply problem.
Gatchalian said Palaweños were complaining about the lengthy rotational brownouts they experienced in their province amid the cooperative’s inefficiencies in coming up with solutions to the problem.
Gatchalian, chairman of the Senate committee of energy, facilitated a dialog and held a committee hearing with stakeholders of Paleco more than a year ago to determine the cause of the long blackouts in the province.
The senator also urged NEA to take over Paleco.
Gatchalian said each Paleco consumer experienced an average of 126 power interruptions in 2017, which he said was beyond the NEA standard of 25 interruptions per consumer per year.
This resulted in an average of 16 hours of power interruption every month or a total of 187 hours in 2017.
Based on the NEA standard, the acceptable frequency of power interruption is 45 hours per consumer per year.
Gatchalian said in July 2017, Palawan consumers had to endure 31 hours of blackouts due to unreliable power providers which failed to fulfill their obligations.
“It is the responsibility of NEA to ensure that all covered areas of electric cooperatives get reliable power. In this case, Paleco’s customers are experiencing serious problems with power outages. NEA needs to step in now. Let’s not prolong this problem further,” he said.