MANILA, Philippines —
“Meralco provides the most reliable service among all major electric cooperatives and distribution utilities or ECDUs, with outages suffered by the average consumer totaling to mere minutes in an entire year, versus days or weeks worth of blackouts for other neighboring ECDUs,” Salceda said. HB 9793 also seeks to expand the scope of the company’s operations, a provision absent in its existing franchise, RA 9209, which was signed into law in June 2003.
“The DOE is supposed to provide reliable and affordable energy for all Filipinos, but instead chose and continues to insist on using these fossil fuels despite their proven unreliability and high prices,” Arances added. The Visayas grid was also placed on yellow alert with an available capacity of 2,790 MW amid a peak demand of 2,444 MW.