by Fel V. Maragay

FORMER President Joseph Estrada said Wednesday industrial and commercial firms in Mindanao should maximize the use of their own standby generators to produce up to 223 megawatts of electricity and lessen the 600-750 MW power shortage in the island.

Estrada said the government should require the private firms to cut their electricity consumption by l0 percent to save up to l20 MW.

“The use by commercial-industrial plants of their own generator sets will reduce the pressure on the Mindanao grid during peak hours so that residential users are spared from brownouts,” he told a press conference at the Partido ng Masang Pilipino national headquarters in Mandaluyong City.

The former president said that the government, for its part, would have to lease generators and power barges at a cost of P3.78 billion while extending P3.6 billion in subsidy to privately owned generator.

His proposed solution would cost the government only P7.38 billion, during the power crisis as hydroelectric power plants produce less with low water levels in Lake Lanao and the Agus and Pulangi rivers in the summer months.

Estrada and his team of national candidates took a one-day respite from the election campaign to meet the press and present remedial measures to the power crisis.

He warned that the more immediate and fearsome offshoot of this crisis, if allowed to go unchecked, could seriously derail the national and local elections barely two months from now.

Top

(Published in the Manila Standard Today newspaper on 2010/march/18.)