Power crisis remains stumbling block for RP

Power crisis remains stumbling block for RP

MANILA (AFP): The Philippines' nearly three-year-long power
crisis remains an obstacle to economic growth despite the
government's claims to the contrary, the World Bank said in a
statement released yesterday.

"Peak electricity demand in the country is expected to double
by the year 2000," World Bank official Claudio Fernandez said in
the statement.

He said that despite the government's crash generating
program, which focused on gas turbine and diesel generating
plants that could quickly be put into service, "lack of power is
still the most constraining factor in the country's economic
development."

Fernandez, the task manager of a World Bank-assisted
geothermal power project in the eastern island of Leyte, said
"the power shortage has cost the country at least one billion
dollars a year in forgone economic output."

President Fidel Ramos declared earlier this year that the
energy crisis was over with about 885 megawatts of new generating
capacity having been put onstream last year, along with another
943 megawatts scheduled to be completed this year.

The World Bank earlier approved US$227 million in loans to the
National Power Corp. and the Philippine National Oil Co., two
state firms involved in a $1.33-billion, 440-megawatt geothermal
power project in Leyte that is being built under a
"build-operate-transfer" arrangement.

The project "will help alleviate" the power crisis, Fernandez
said.

He said the Philippines had entered into 35 build-operate-
transfer contracts covering more than 5,000 megawatts with the
private sector, and that "about 80 percent of the country's
incremental power needs would be supplied by the private sector
by 1998."