NGCP’s Cebu-Bohol Interconnection Project, the brainchild of former Bohol Rep. and Governor Atty. Edgar Chatto, now stands as a landmark in the province’s energy security, delivering a stable power link between Cebu and Bohol that Chatto fought to conceive and realize during his years in public service. (Contributed photo)
A former Bohol governor and congressman is calling on local government units across the Philippines to take a more assertive role in energy planning and renewable power development, drawing on hard lessons learned after a catastrophic earthquake and typhoon left the island province in total darkness more than a decade ago.
Former Gov. and Rep. Edgar Chatto, who governed Bohol during some of the most turbulent years in the province’s recent history, made the appeal in a public post this week as rising global fuel prices — driven in part by the ongoing Middle East conflict — continue to strain households, businesses, and agricultural producers across the country.
“These lessons are worth remembering again, especially with the current fuel price increases affecting all sectors of society,” Chatto wrote.
Chatto traced the origins of Bohol’s local energy policy to a defining moment of crisis: the 7.2-magnitude earthquake that struck the province on October 15, 2013 — the same year Super Typhoon Yolanda battered the Visayas region — plunging Bohol into weeks of total power blackout.
The twin disasters exposed the province’s near-total dependence on a fragile power supply infrastructure and, Chatto said, forced him to confront the question of what role a local government could and should play in securing its own energy future.
The answer, he said, was that waiting for the national government to act was not enough.
While the Department of Energy is the primary agency mandated under Philippine law to formulate and implement national energy policies, plans, and programs, Chatto argued that LGUs cannot afford to be passive bystanders — particularly when power disruptions hit local economies and communities first and hardest.
BEDAG
In 2014, Chatto established the Bohol Energy Development Advisory Group, known by its acronym BEDAG, as a provincial mechanism to advise and assist the Bohol government on energy-related issues and guide power development on the island.
BEDAG brought together a broad coalition of stakeholders under the chairmanship of the provincial governor. Its membership included representatives from the Department of Energy, the academe, the business sector, non-governmental organizations, and Bohol’s power distribution utilities — namely Bohol Electric Cooperative 1, Bohol Electric Cooperative 2, and Bohol Light Company, Inc.
The body was assigned a sweeping mandate: to craft a Bohol Island Power Development Plan aimed at ensuring sufficient, reliable, and affordable electricity across the province; to review and recommend policies and projects related to energy and power; to attract investors into the energy sector; and to promote alternative energy sources including solar, hydroelectric, wind, and geothermal power.
By 2017, BEDAG had taken an explicit policy stand, formally expressing support for renewable energy development and opposing the construction of coal-fired power plants anywhere in the province.
Grid connection
Among the most consequential projects championed by BEDAG, Chatto said, was the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines’ Cebu-Bohol Power Interconnection Project — the transmission link that connected Bohol to the national power grid for the first time — alongside advocacy for a baseload backup power plant in the municipality of Ubay in the island’s northeastern coast.
The grid interconnection, Chatto explained, fundamentally altered the investment calculus for renewable energy developers in Bohol.
Before the connection, any private investor considering a power project on the island had to weigh viability almost entirely against local demand projections from Bohol’s distribution utilities — a relatively small and constrained market.
With Bohol now integrated into the national grid managed by NGCP, any electricity generated in excess of local demand can be sold into the Wholesale Electricity Spot Market, or WESM — the Philippine market where electricity is traded at wholesale prices, functioning in a manner analogous to a stock exchange for power. That opened Bohol to a dramatically wider range of investors and project sizes.
“More investors are now enticed to put up renewable energy supply projects,” Chatto said, “as any excess power over and above the local demand can now be easily sold to the WESM.”
A model for crisis resilience
Chatto’s remarks arrive at a moment of acute economic pressure.
Fuel prices have surged sharply in recent months following the escalation of armed conflict in the Middle East, with fertilizer costs — a petroleum derivative — rising by as much as 65 percent according to estimates cited by lawmakers, threatening agricultural output and food security.
Power generation costs dependent on imported fuel have risen correspondingly, with cascading effects on electricity rates paid by ordinary consumers.
Chatto did not offer prescriptive policy recommendations in his post but framed BEDAG’s history as a replicable model — one in which local governments, rather than waiting on national agencies, convene their own multi-stakeholder energy planning bodies, identify vulnerabilities in local supply, and actively work to attract clean energy investment as a hedge against future crises.
The implication of his message was pointed: provinces and cities that had invested in energy resilience and renewable infrastructure before a crisis are better positioned to weather one when it arrives. Those that had not are now paying the price.
Chatto currently serves as chairman of the Boy Scouts of the Philippines-Bohol Council following his exit from elective politics. He served as governor of Bohol from 2001 to 2010 and again briefly thereafter, and as representative of the province’s second congressional district.
The 2013 earthquake, which killed more than 200 people and destroyed hundreds of churches, public buildings, and homes across Bohol, remains the most destructive seismic event in the province’s recorded history. The recovery it necessitated — in infrastructure, in governance, and in energy policy — shaped much of what followed in Bohol’s decade of rebuilding.