I am accompanied by my cats in my isolation. I still feel bad, head is heavy, still have colds but no fever. My body wants to break into a fever but can’t, which is frustrating. My whole body aches so I’ve been popping flu meds every 6 hrs.
The beauty of my situation right now is that I can send my kids to the other house so I can move freely in my house while I’m still contagious. My cleaning lady was doing my laundry downstairs while I get myself food and do my bathroom business. Then I locked myself in my airconditioned bedroom.
Then the power went out. 😵💫
Our perennial problem: low power supply. Our power plants are old and we need more capacity. Our power, unlike the rest of Southeast Asia, is not subsidized and we pay market rates for it, making us the country with the most expensive electricity rates in Asia after Japan. Renewable energy’s problem is its unreliability (Mother nature is a bitch, right?) and it is not a simple plug and play into the national grid. You cannot just dispatch RE during peaking hours in a simple snap. It fluctuates and the grid would go haywire because of that. What we need are baseload plants and these can only be provided for now by fossil fuel-fired power plants and geothermal plants. The development of such facilities takes 10 years, or longer in the case of geothermals.
Today’s power outage is brought to you by the shutdown of Ilijan gas-fired plant in Pangasinan. That plant is so old that it has to be decommissioned in my view. Anyway, that’s always the problem, we lack enough baseload that if one of them shuts down, the whole Luzon grid goes into chaos. Why didn’t we have enough baseload? When power was not yet liberalized under EPIRA, the government did not invest in the development of new power plants. Population growth and urbanization caught up with this acute power supply that “brownouts” or blackouts (as known outside the Philippines) are a normal occurrence in the 1980s and 1990s. I grew up with regular power outages that we have several rechargeable lamps charging all day and kerosone lamps on standby so we could do homework at night.
After EPIRA law was passed, all the assets of the government under PSALM were privatized so that these can be rehabilitated and efficiently run by the private sector. Prior to privatization, the National Power Corp (Napocor) had bastardized these and made them into milking cows. Marcos Sr had a nuclear power plant built in Bataan but it was riddled with corruption (Marcos et al milked it to death) that it couldn’t be run even before it could start operations. Doing so would cause another Chernobyl, they said. It’s several billion dollars’ worth of white elephant sitting on a major fault line. I do not trust the government when it comes to such things.
So long story short, we didn’t have power this afternoon and it’s so freaking hot in my room. I had to get out.
I’ve been writing about this privatization shit for almost two decades and yet here we are, still having this same crap. The power crisis is as old as I am. Damn it. Yes we have been deploying RE projects here and there but they’re not enough. Some are off-grid, some are on-grid. Under development are five baseload power plants but these are fossil fuel-fired that by the time they will get commissioned, it would be too costly to run them because of ESG standards shit imposed by insurance firms, project finance dudes, and the overall investment community.