By Jelly F. Musico
MANILA, Sept. 17 (PNA) – Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago said on Wednesday she is in favor of granting emergency powers to President Benigno S. Aquino III to solve the looming energy crisis in 2015.
”I am in favor of granting emergency powers to President Aquino because it is authorized both by the Constitution and the EPIRA (Electric Power Industry Reform Act) Law,” Santiago said in a media interview.
Santiago said the decision of President Aquino to formally ask Congress to grant him the authority was correct due to insufficient generating capacity of the country.
”We need 300 or maybe more megawatts to prevent what is said to be the upcoming blackout schedule. If that is the case, we have no choice, we need at least 500 MW in reserve as a buffer stock and we cannot get that by building power plants at this late. We need about 2-3 years to build a power plant,” Santiago explained.
Santiago stressed that there is no other solution but to grant the President emergency powers to solve the shortage of power, especially in the summer of 2015.
”There is no other solution as I said we cannot build another power plant because we don’t have the time and it costs too much. So we should give him the power to make sure that the outages will not follow the schedules that have been already drawn by certain experts,” she said.
Last Tuesday, the Senate received the request from President Aquino but some senators questioned the absence of the draft of the joint resolution asking for the President to be granted authority to contract additional generating capacity for the 300-megawatt requirement.
Senate President Franklin Drilon promised to work in the joint resolution but was skeptical on granting favor to Energy Secretary Jericho Petilla to pass the resolution before the end of this month.
”That’s impossible because we will have our break next week and we will return October 20,” Drilon said.
Drilon said the Senate cannot rush on the grant of emergency powers because it will involve Php6 billion.
Santiago, however, said if the Senate would give the President emergency powers, “let’s give it right away so that he can make the solution.”
”I would vote if given the opportunity of giving the President emergency powers,” Santiago said.
On Petilla’s request for one-year emergency power, Santiago said the period is too long, adding “six months is enough.”
”I think six months is enough because you remember the name is emergency and you look up the meaning of emergency in the dictionary, generally there is no emergency for one whole year,” Santiago said.
”The only emergency to last for a year is between the husband and his wife, that’s a marital emergency,” she added in jest.
Meanwhile, Executive Secretary Paquito Ochoa Jr. said it’s up to Congress to decide on how long the emergency power will stay.
”We’ll, it’s up to the Senate and the House to resolve but we are proposing only in this emergency power to solve a short, small window where the DOE is saying that we’ll have a shortage in energy,” Ochoa told the media after the Senate hearing on the proposed Php2.567-billion budget for 2015 by the Office of the President.
Ochoa said the DOE has perhaps asked for one year due to the many technical matters needed to solve the energy problem.
”This involves procurement issues, precisely we are asking for this to make sure that we will not incur any brownout. So everything possible that we need to do, we will do it but the period I think, that will depend on these processes,” he said.
Ochoa said Malacanang is already preparing the draft of the Joint Resolution.
”We will submit formally to the Senate and the House a draft resolution,” he said. (PNA)