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By Efren L. Danao, Senior Reporter
The Senate minority bloc will insist on amending
the Electric Power Industry Reform Act (Epira) even if the House
Committee on Energy headed by Rep. Mikey Arroyo of Pampanga had
initiated moves to shelve it.
Senate Minority Leader Aquilino Pimentel Jr.
said that the amendment of the provisions on take-or-pay, systems
loss and open access are worth pursuing to ease the burden of
consumers.
The House Committee on Energy had issued a
manifesto saying that industry players had already agreed to
accelerate the implementation of open access, thus rendering the
proposed Epira amendments “moot and academic.”
Pimentel said that it was not even clear whether
the inclination of the House committee to shelve the Epira
amendments had Malacañang’s support. He stressed that regardless
of the inclinations of the House committee, the Senate minority
would press for the amendment of the Epira.
“The minority bloc believes that the
amendments of Epira are necessary to bring down the cost of
electricity and to encourage investors to infuse much-needed capital
into the power industry,” Pimentel said.
Scrapping the ‘take or pay’ provision
He urged lawmakers to resolve once and for all
the issue of whether to scrap the “take-or-pay” provision in the
supply contracts of the National Power Corp. (Napocor) with
independent power producers which required the company to pay for
the entire contracted power, even if not fully supplied or used.
Pimentel said that this “onerous” provision
is one of the major reasons for the high cost of power in the
country and has lead to the ballooning of Napocor’s debts.
He said that there is also a need to discontinue
or at least modify the existing practice on systems loss of power
distributors like the Manila Electric Co., of passing on to
consumers their losses arising from pilferage of electricity and
technical malfunctions.
“It would be unconscionable to require the
consumers to absorb the system losses, which account for 8 percent
to 9 percent of their monthly power bills, since such losses were
incurred not through their fault,” he explained.
He urged power distributors to exert greater
effort in cracking down on power pilferers instead of adding to the
financial burden of consumers who had been dutifully paying their
bills.
He also said that pursuing the Epira amendments
would enable lawmakers to study the proposal to hasten the open
access regime, which would give industrial users the right to choose
their power distributors. Open access was supposed to have started
in 2004 or three years after the enactment of Epira, when Napocor
was supposed to have privatized 70 percent of its power generating
assets.
Under the amendments proposed by Sen. Juan Ponce
Enrile, the threshold of privatization will be scaled down to 50
percent, which means that retail competition and open access would
be immediately implemented.
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