The President of the National Association of General Managers of Electric Cooperatives (NAGMEC) slammed power giant Meralco after company Chief Executive Officer Oscar Reyes recently revealed that Meralco is planning to expand beyond their franchise areas and build microgrids in communities without electricity.
In an interview, NAGMEC chief Sergio Dagooc said this is an open admission that Meralco, along with other “private sector profiteers,” intends to breach boundaries “not for public gain but to further enlarge their take at the expense of electric cooperatives (ECs) and the impoverished.”
“In the guise of total electrification and bringing electricity service to unserved communities, these private interests only want to expand their areas of operation and fill their coffers to the limits,” Dagooc said.
Aside from their business plans, Meralco, according to the NAGMEC official, must also admit first that they are remiss in their own coverage ares as they also have not fully energized communities as prescribed by their franchise grants which were given decades before the advent of rural electrification in 1969––this despite the fact that their areas are small and their consumers are more densely packed than those of ECs.
“Energize your backyards first. We can take care of ours, given sufficient government electrification funds and so long as we are able to get private sector partners, to electrify the unserved rural communities under our coverage,” he said.
Microgrids are small-scale electricity distribution systems that can be operated independently from the country’s energy transmission facilities.
As revealed by the Meralco executive, the company had started making preparations for the setting up of microgrids outside their franchise areas and plans to operate them by 2019. Reyes said that their expansion plans include efforts to negotiate for “tariff flexibility.”
The top Meralco man admitted that Meralco was venturing into microgrids “not as a corporate social giving, which we are doing for un-electrified public schools, but as a business proposition.”
According to Dagooc, these revelations “run contrary to their claim that they want to help the government and unserved communities.”
“The only ones they are helping are themselves; if they were truly altruistic, then why demand special tariff rates to enable them to operate in these areas,” asked Dagooc.
“Stop the encroachment, stop fooling the public, and stop misleading our policymakers.”