Still struggling as always

One major reason why foreign investors avoid putting up manufacturing plants here is our iffy power situation.

- BOO CHANCO

We are notorious for red and yellow alerts in our power grids because the margin between demand and supply is exceedingly thin.

El Niño was a problem this year as it dried up our storage hydro power plants. Then, the coal power plants that provide for the base load demand are quite old and not very reliable. That's true not just in Luzon but also in Panay and that caused serious power outages.

In Iloilo, the dollar-earning BPOs had to invest in diesel standby generators to be able to operate.

On paper, Panay Island, of which Iloilo City is a part, has four large coal power plants with a total capacity of 451 megawatts (MW), and the demand of Iloilo City is just 132 MW.

But because the Panay coal plants are badly maintained and constantly break down, power supply is the biggest problem of Iloilo City that hinders its tiger economy ambitions.

NGCP's completion of the lines that interconnect Panay with the Visayas and Mindanao grids offers hope, but the specter of power failures remains as Negros has an abundance of unreliable solar plants using the line that require priority dispatch and crowd out other sources.

That's the general story for the rest of the country. A succession of post-EDSA administrations failed miserably to make the power sector keep up with the economy's demand. Total electricity generation per person in the Philippines is just 1,008 kilowatt hour (kWh), below that of upper middle-income countries (5,222 kWh)—a classification NEDA keeps saying we will attain by next year.