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."