Akbayan Rep. Walden Bello said Meralco should be taken to task for any shortfall in power because of its decision to choose the Redondo project rather than other more viable proposals at that time. “Isn’t the energy crisis, to a great extent, created by the inability of the Redondo plant of Meralco to come on stream? Meralco is in fact a company that is controlled by Beacon electric, First Philippine Holdings, Metro Pacific and First Pacific, all of which are tied in to the Salim family, an Indonesian family,” Bello said. “This is a matter of national security. Meralco controls 70 percent of the distribution of electricity in Luzon and we have an electricity distributor that is in fact an Indonesian-owned company,” he said during his interpellation on the floor during the plenary debates. Bello said he and his colleague, Rep. Barry Gutierrez, voted no to the joint resolution because they were not convinced that the emergency powers were necessary for what he called an “artificial power crisis.” Malampaya maintenance Bello blamed Shell Corp.’s unilateral decision to do its maintenance work on the Malampaya natural gas field off Palawan province—which provides up to 45 percent of Luzon’s power requirements—in March and April next year when demand for power would be at its peak. “Instead of passing this bill giving the President emergency powers, I have proposed a simple alternative and that is for Congress to ask the President to order Shell to do its maintenance work later in the year. He has the full authority to do this, as the Department of Energy (DOE) admitted during the committee hearings,” Bello said. He said the DOE was hard-pressed to give “a good, consistent reason” why the shutdown could not be delayed “so Philippine energy security would come ahead of Shell’s corporate bottom line.”
Posted on: Fri, 12 Dec 2014 07:25:19 +0000
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