Energy Undersecretary Donato D. Marcos has been designated officer-in-charge (OIC) of the National Power Corporation (NPC), a state-run firm that has very strategic residual function of providing electricity access to island-mode or off-grid areas.
The Office of the President, through the authority vested on Executive Secretary Salvador Medialdea, has officially approved the designation of Marcos, who will be replacing Atty Melchor P. Ridulme, a veteran executive of NPC and currently the vice president for legal affairs of the company. Ridulme took a brief stint as NPC OIC after the sudden demise of the company’s president and chief executive officer – Pio J. Benavidez – in June this year.
The new NPC officer-in-charge does not have comprehensive background in the power industry, because the sectors that Marcos has been overseeing in the Department of Energy (DOE) are those in the upstream and downstream oil and gas sub-segments.
Prior to his appointment as DOE Undersecretary under the leadership of former Energy Secretary Carlos Jericho Petilla in 2014, Marcos was a local government leader, having served as mayor of Paombong, Bulacan.
At the energy department, the only assignment given to Marcos that has links with the power sector is on crafting the country’s policy on nuclear power as well as the targeted re-powering of the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant (BNPP), but that never progressed beyond the study phases undertaken by various collaborator-partners of the DOE, including those of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the Rosatom State Nuclear Energy Corporation of Russia.
When it comes to off-grid electrification, the DOE is targeting to deploy small modular reactors (SMRs) across island-grids – but the anticipated rollout of such nuclear technologies would be in the next seven years yet or around 2027, because SMR nuclear technologies are still under ‘experiment deployments’ also in various parts of the world.
As officer-in-charge of NPC, it was specified that Marcos “was given the authority to oversee the day-to-day activities of the corporation, and execute its plans, programs and policies as approved by the Board,” and for him to uphold the mandates of the government-run corporation based on prescriptions of relevant laws and edicts.
Marcos, who is a Mining Engineer by profession, has a plantilla or permanent position as Undersecretary of the DOE; and as such, he will remain in his post in the agency while concurrently exercising his function as OIC of NPC.
“Although he retains his present position as Undersecretary, Marcos has sought permission from Secretary Alfonso Cusi to relinquish some of his functions in order to allot more time and energy in leading Napocor,” a statement from NPC has reiterated.
Marcos noted that “apart from ensuring smooth operations and prudence in the use of its resources, we would also like to focus on impactful projects that will benefit stakeholders especially the poor and some of the minority groups that Napocor affects.”
NPC has already started transitioning its Small Power Utilities Group (SPUG) into technology hybridization – or amalgamating the use of renewable energy (RE) resources with diesel or bunker C-fed generating facilities in providing electricity to off-grid areas.
That investment strategy in the SPUG domains, according to the company, will help pare the country’s carbon footprints and will also bring down the cost for ratepayers in the covered areas. ###