‘Airtight’ damage suit readied vs NGCP

ILOILO City – The city and provincial governments of Iloilo are preparing for an “airtight” civil case against the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) in a bid to recover the damages caused by the four-day blackout that hit Panay Island and the rest of Western Visayas

Lawyers from the City Legal Office and the Provincial Legal Office met yesterday for the second time at the Iloilo City Hall and discussed various legal issues and the evidence they needed to support the filing of a Petition for Mandamus with the Regional Trial Court.

City Legal Officer Edgardo Gil said that yesterday’s meeting was a case build-up wherein they discussed the gathering of evidence.

“We will meet again next week and by then, we can gather so much evidence and momentum for the filing of the case,” Gil told Panay News.

Each lawyer from the city and province of Iloilo will be given his assigned tasks on what evidence to gather and pursue, said Gil.

“We will make sure we will have an airtight case. Otherwise, we will not file it,” he said.

The city legal officer said that the damages that they will be seeking in the Petition for Mandamus will also be based on the losses reported by various establishments after the blackout.

The city government pegged the losses at P1.5 billion while the provincial government lost about P3.5 billion during the three-day power outage.

For his part, Provincial Legal Officer Dennis Ventillacion said they will request from the Department of Energy a copy of the Transmission Development Plan (TDP) and will check the latest status of the Cebu-Negros-Panay (CNP) Backbone project.

Ventillacion said they will also request data from the National Economic and Development Authority ( NEDA), the Department of Energy, and other needed data tackled during the Senate inquiry.

The meeting of the city and provincial lawyers from the two local government units was an offshoot of the call of Mayor Jerry Treñas, who ordered the filing of a class suit after the NGCP issued an advisory warning the consumers to prepare for another round of power blackout on Panay Island in the next three to five days.

Treñas said the NGCP lacked the necessary measures to ensure the safety of the transmission lines and to guarantee that Region 6 had sufficient electricity.

He mai n t ai ned t hat Congress should continue i nvestigating the power blackout from Jan. 2 to Jan. 5 that hit Panay Island and other parts of Region 6.

MORE Power and Electric Corp. (MORE Power), the sole power distributor in Iloilo City, had also urged its consumers to prepare for another blackout in Panay due to “unresolved issues” in some major power plants.

Meanwhile, the TDP, which the provincial government will be requesting from the Energy department, outlines essential expansion and modernization projects for the transmission system to ensure the reliable and efficient delivery of electricity throughout the country.

The TDP also complements the projected load growth and generation expansion, including the capacity additions from renewable energy ( RE) in line with the target of a minimum 50 percent generation mix by 2040 and beyond.

The blackout on Panay Island could been prevented had the NGCP completed on time the 230 kV Cebu-NegrosPanay (CNP) Backbone project, a major part of the TDP.

Based on the 2016 TDP, the NGCP was supposed to have completed the CNP 230 kV Backbone Project in 2020, but the completion date has been delayed at least seven times from the original completion date of December 2020.

As of October 2023, the said project is 99.64 percent completed, but the estimated completion time is yet to be assessed based on the Transmission Project Status Report October 2023 update.

To recall, t he Energy Regulatory Commission ( ERC) issued a show- cause order against the NGCP in July 2023 over delays in 37 transmission projects. The ERC said that the NGCP failed to meet its proposed timelines to complete the projects.

Some of the long-delayed transmission projects in the Visayas region include Stages 2 and 3 of the CNP 230 kV Backbone Project, CebuLapu Lapu Transmission Project, Mindanao-Visayas Interconnection Project, Naga (Cebu) Sub-station Upgrading Project, Tagbiliran 69 kV Substation Project, Visayas Voltage Improvement Project./