Solon pushes for add’l power plants

By BONG FABE, Contributor
THE only way to address the looming power crisis in Mindanao is to build more power plants in the island.

Rep. Teofisto “TG” Guingona III (3rd District, Bukidnon), who is running for senator under the Liberal Party, said that aside from privatizing power plants, government must be aggressive in building additional power plants to avert the impending power crisis in the island.

“While we are privatizing power plants that are already producing, national government should put up more power plants. This is a stop gap measure to arrest another crisis in the power sector,” he said.

Guingona is a member of the 14th Congress’ Joint Congressional Power Commission (JCPC)-Oversight Committee and Committee on Energy,
Guingona, however, stressed that additional power plants to be built should use biomass as fuel to help mitigate global warming and climate change and also help rural farmers.

“Aside from biomass being a renewable and eco-friendly fuel to the power plants, it would also mean an additional income for our farmers in countrysides,” he said.
The impending power crisis will greatly affect Mindanao’s economy, said Vicente Lao, chairperson of the Mindanao Business Council.

Lao said that the power crisis will affect the southern Philippines in five years.
But the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) said the power crisis is already being felt in Mindanao, exacerbated by very low water levels in its hydropower plants because of the onslaught of the El Niño phenomenon.

Carl Cesar Rebuta, team leader of the Cagayan de Oro City office of the Legal Rights and Natural Resources Center-Kasama sa Kalikasan/Friend of the Earth (LRC-KsK/FoE), meanwhile, expressed hope that Guingona is not endorsing the proposed Pulangi V Hydro-electric project in Damulog, Bukidnon.

Rebuta said the Pulangi V project will create Mindanao’s biggest man-made lake of 400 square kilometers or 40,000 hectares that will totally flood 23 barangays in the Bukidnon municipalities of Damulog, Kibawe, Dangcagan, Kitaotao, Quezon, and President Roxas town in North Cotabato.

He said this mega dam project, which is part of the Pulangi River System project of the National Power Corporation (NPC), is 140 meters in height and will generate a maximum generating of 350 megawatts.
“This would be the tallest dam and biggest energy generating capacity in Mindanao,” he said.

But this will also be “an ecological nightmare with alarming consequences to man and the environment.
Aside from submerging 23 barangays in the 5 municipalities of Bukidnon and one town in North Cotabato, the project will also erase the “sacred place, the burial ground of Apu Mamalu, the ancestor of the Lumad in Mindanao.”

Rebuta urged Guingona, who comes from Bukidnon, and others to oppose this project and not allow the desecration of the cultural heritage landmark of Mindanao—the Stonehenge-like structure that is the burial ground of Apu Mamalu.