With a power supply crisis jolting the next administration, the team of Presidential frontrunner Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. is seriously weighing options to push for the repowering of the mothballed 620-megawatt Bataan Nuclear Power Plant (BNPP) so it can eventually augment the country’s electricity supply.
In a media forum, former Congressman Jonathan Dela Cruz, who is one of the advisers of the Uniteam Party on its Energy Agenda, conveyed that Marcos or BBM has already sounded off his desire “to revisit the BNPP issue, because we’re talking about cheap and baseload power for our communities.”
He further echoed that Marcos mentioned about “taking a second look at the Bataan nuclear power plant and all other sources of cheap energy,” as could be referenced on the experience of other countries that had leaned on their baseload energy supply with nuclear power technology, including neighbors in Asia like Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and China.
Dela Cruz noted though that both the safety of operations as well as the cost implications of the BNPP repowering will have to be studied if Marcos will clinch the top leadership in government after the May 2022 elections.
“That (BNPP repowering) will be a big thing, because the facility is already there. The problem then was: the project became too political. But I hope that we can get out of that politics and just make sure that this is a safe, affordable and beneficial source of power for our country,” he stressed.
However, with previous estimates that the nuclear plant’s revival may warrant up to $2.0 billion worth of investments, Dela Cruz indicated that the mode of project operations being contemplated by the Marcos team would either be a public-private partnership (PPP) deal or portion of the financing could be covered by government guarantee.
“There are suggestions about a PPP type. But we have to look at all PPP types of partnerships, because we will have to consider the cost of all of these things... it can be a combination, it could be with a government guarantee and it can be with a public-private partnership. But again, it all depends on the cost,” he said.
Relative to the proposed PPP arrangement, Dela Cruz sounded off caution “because many of the PPP projects ended up to be more of a burden to our consumers, so a government guarantee that can be provided for setting up these kinds of plants, we might need it because nobody will finance that kind of activity without some kind of assurance that the capital to be put into this kind of plant, for example, will be available at some point in time in terms of repayment and at the same time, in terms of profit.”
Previous studies undertaken by various foreign entities, including that of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), showed that the magnitude of funding needed to bring back BNPP to its operational state could go from $1.0 billion to $2.0 billion. It was similarly emphasized that the cost estimates did not cover yet the necessary "system redundancies" required as added security features in nuclear power facilities following the 2011 Fukushima tragedy.
Aside from funding issue, there are also concerns as to which entity of government shall operate it given that the Electric Power Industry Reform Act (EPIRA) already prohibits state-run National Power Corporation from owning a power generating asset.
Apart from BNPP’s repowering, the Marcos team is also planning to pursue massive-scale renewable energy installations; the deployment of small modular reactors (SMRs) for nuclear; tapping ‘green coal plants’; and enhancing exploration and development of indigenous energy resources, including oil and gas discoveries across Philippine petroleum basins.