IN CONNECTION with Iloilo City’s electricity supply, MORE Power, together with AP Renewables Inc. (APRI), recently filed a joint application with the Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) for a power supply agreement.
Included in the application is a requirement for confidential treatment of information. This requirement for confidentiality raises concerns.
Republic Act (RA) 11212 gives MORE power “a franchise to establish, operate, and maintain, for commercial purposes and in the public interest, a distribution system for the conveyance of electric power to the end users in Iloilo City and ensuring the continuous and uninterrupted supply of electricity in the franchise area.”
In the public interest.
There is an inherent potential conflict between what is in the public interest and MORE/APRI’s requirement for confidentiality.
We need to be reassured that the proposed power supply agreement is in the public interest.
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In 2011, the Central Negros Electricity Cooperative (Ceneco), with ERC’s approval, signed a contract with Kepco Salcon Inc. to provide electricity. Unknown to the consumers at the time, this contract specified penalties if Ceneco did not purchase the quantity of electricity specified in the contract.
It turned out that the contract was faulty since there was no way in which Ceneco’s consumers could consume the contractual quantity of electricity. As a result, in 2013, a joint application between Ceneco and Kepco-Salcon was submitted to the ERC under Case No. ERC 2013-141RC to force Ceneco consumers to pay for the electricity they did not want, did not need, and did not receive.
The amount demanded from the hapless end users was not trivial. It was, in fact, P189 million.
Understandably, perhaps, ERC did not immediately make a decision. Consequently, Kepco-Salcon, this time unaccompanied by Ceneco, made, in 2014, a second application to ERC.
Again, ERC did not make a decision as to whether Ceneco’s consumer should be penalized.
In 2017, Kepco-Salcon made a third application, this time for P232 million. ERC, under its then Chairman, soon to be seriously discredited by the Ombudsman, approved this application. Ceneco consumers are still paying for this not existent electricity.
“In the public interest” is a cant phrase. Nevertheless I hope, in the case of the MORE/APRI application, it is taken seriously by ERC.
Agnes Devanadera, ERC chairman, has, in the past said that she would evaluate previous bilateral power sharing agreements. No results have been seen by us.
We need an ERC which is serious about making decisions in the public interest./PN
