A member of the House of Representatives has assailed the country’s power industry for decades of broken promises, calling for a deep investigation into persistent brownouts, high electricity rates, and what he described as an unjust system of pass-through charges that burden Filipino consumers.
Rep. Arthur Yap of Murang Kuryente Partylist delivered the privilege speech during session, which was itself disrupted by successive power interruptions — an irony he did not let pass.
“If Congress itself is not safe from defective power service, how much more the ordinary Filipino?” Yap said.
The lawmaker’s speech came as the Philippines marks the 25th anniversary of the Electric Power Industry Reform Act, signed into law on June 26, 2001.
EPIRA promised stability, efficiency, and lower electricity costs for consumers.
Yap said those promises remain unfulfilled.
“More than two decades after EPIRA was enacted, the Philippines ranks among the countries with the highest electricity rates in Asia, while we continue to suffer from thin reserves, forced outages, and brownouts,” he said.
The House session last week was held under the shadow of simultaneous red alerts in the Luzon and Visayas grids, with Yap noting that thousands of megawatts remained unavailable due to forced outages of generating units.
“This is no longer just a technical problem. The Philippines is facing a power reliability crisis driven by insufficient dependable capacity,” he said.
Yap took aim at the practice of automatically passing costs to consumers — including generation charges, transition charges, system losses, and what he called “missing charges” — while reliable service remained unguaranteed.
“All fees are obligated to be paid by the people, but reliable service carries no guarantee. And when the system fails, it is also the brownout that is passed on to the public,” he said.
He also questioned the continued collection of the Universal Charge, which includes the stranded debt of the former National Power Corporation, saying consumers have been paying for it for 25 years with no clear end in sight.
Yap called for a congressional investigation into three areas: the prevalence of forced outages in generating plants, the adequacy of regulation by the Department of Energy, the Energy Regulatory Commission, and the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines, and the legality of automatically charging consumers for system inefficiencies.
“Why should the consumer pay for the system’s own inefficiencies and technical losses? Not only does electricity get lost in the lines — they are then charged for it, and taxed on top of that,” he said.
The lawmaker also questioned why policy-related pass-through charges — which he said serve national priorities — are loaded onto electricity bills rather than funded through the national budget.
“There must be a fair and transparent way of funding public policy objectives. Pass-through charges cannot be forced on consumers without their knowledge,” Yap said.
He stopped short of calling for the scrapping of EPIRA or the cancellation of existing power contracts, saying the goal was reform, not repudiation.
“If there are shortcomings in the EPIRA framework after more than two decades, it is our duty to correct them — not tomorrow, not next year, but now,” he said.
“The people’s demand is simple: affordable electricity, fair electricity, and reliable service.”