‘THIS IS PATHETIC’: City councilor blames EPIRA for Visayas brownouts, seeks amendments

ILOILO CITY — An Iloilo City councilor on Wednesday, Sept. 16, called for immediate amendments to the Electric Power Industry Reform Act’s (EPIRA) provisions on private-led power generation. He called the chronic rotational brownouts across the Visayas grid “the height of government incompetence.”

Councilor Rex Marcus Sarabia, in a privilege speech during the Sangguniang Panlungsod session, said access to reliable electricity is fundamentally a matter of human dignity.

He said Filipinos are left without electricity to light their homes at night, while neighboring countries in East and Southeast Asia enjoy economic growth driven by abundant energy.

Sarabia said widespread brownouts across the Visayas are damaging the region’s economic prospects by deterring investors in both the manufacturing and service sectors.

“This is not normal. This is abnormal. This is pathetic. This is the height of government incompetence,” Sarabia said in his speech.

He sharply criticized the Department of Energy (DOE) and the Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) for what he described as a lack of foresight and contingency planning.

He also condemned the absence of both agencies from a committee hearing called by Councilor Romel Duron on Tuesday, Sept. 15.

Sarabia thanked the National Grid Corp. of the Philippines (NGCP) for attending the hearing and addressing concerns. However, he pointed to Section 6 of EPIRA as the root cause of what he described as a structural failure.

“There is a need to amend the EPIRA or at least revisit the implementation of the same or modify its execution, as the current state of the legal framework does not serve the interest of the people,” he said.

EPIRA, or Republic Act No. 9136, was enacted in 2001 to restructure the power industry and open electricity generation to private investors.

Section 6 of the law provides that “power generation shall not be considered a public utility operation.” It also exempts entities engaged in power generation and electricity supply from securing a national franchise.

Sarabia argued that by privatizing power generation and removing it from public utility classification, the government surrendered energy security to an open, competitive market.

Under this framework, he said, power development has become purely “reactive,” leaving citizens helpless when private capital chooses not to invest in new generation facilities.

“What we once enjoyed from the free market, now we are enduring the consequences of what happens when the free market decides what to do, when to stop, when to go on, when not to do it,” he said.

Sarabia said power generation requires proactive government intervention rather than total reliance on market forces.

According to NGCP, the Visayas grid was placed under red and yellow alerts on Sept. 16 because of tight power reserves. As of 8 a.m., available capacity stood at 2,536 megawatts against a peak demand of 2,538 megawatts, a shortfall of 2 megawatts.

The alerts were attributed to the unavailability of large coal plants, as well as limited power imports from the Mindanao grid. The plants include Therma Visayas Inc. Unit 1 in Toledo City, Cebu, and Panay Energy Development Corp. Unit 3 in Iloilo City.

NGCP reported eight plants on forced outage and 15 operating at derated capacities, resulting in 774.2 megawatts of unavailable capacity as of Sept. 16.

“I refuse to accept, and I refuse to normalize the dysfunctionality and incompetence of our government,” Sarabia said.