Read this in The Manila Times digital edition.
ONE of the fears that was stoked by certain groups just before and during the midterm elections this past Monday was that the all-too-frequently unreliable supply of electricity in many parts of the country would fail and put the process at risk, causing delays, uncertain accuracy in vote counts, or even preventing people in affected areas from voting at all. Most of these assertions from self-styled "consumer advocates" were lost in the general din of public attention-seeking in the last days of the campaign, which in some respects may be just as well. The substance of advocacies that consist of occasionally going out and picketing in front of Meralco's headquarters, or mass-mailing endless variations of the same short-on-detail, long-on-apoplexy press release is not very useful in the search for actual solutions.
Make no mistake, however, solutions are needed. The reliability of electricity supply is not equal to the country's First World aspirations, and electricity prices are still unacceptably high. Both of those realities are far more complex than the simplistic, appeal to emotion way in which they are described by the consumer advocates, which is why they continually find themselves shouting into the void, convinced that the fundamental reason accessibility, affordability and reliability of electricity is at all unsatisfactory is because the power industry is simply out to pillage the hapless populace.
Continue reading with one of these options:
Ad-free access
P 80 per month
(billed annually at P 960)
- Unlimited ad-free access to website articles
- Limited offer: Subscribe today and get digital edition access for free (accessible with up to 3 devices)