Malacanang has released the appointments of four new undersecretaries of the Department of Energy (DOE) who will help implement the key energy sector policies and flagship programs of the Marcos administration.
According to highly placed sources, designated as new Energy Undersecretaries are: Felix William “Wimpy” Fuentebella, Sharon S. Garin, Alessandro O. Sales and Giovanni Carlo J. Bacordo.
Fuentebella, a lawyer by profession was a former Congressman of Camarines Sur and he also served as Senior Undersecretary and Spokesperson of the DOE under the Duterte administration; while Garin was a former Congresswoman of Ioilo and she previously chaired the House Committee on Economic Affairs.
For Sales, he was a former vice president for Exploration and Production at the Filipino-owned oil and gas firm Philodrill Corporation; and prior to his appointment, he has been tapped by Energy Secretary Raphael P.M. Lotilla as his technical adviser for upstream petroleum ventures.
Bacordo, on the other, has served as chief of the Philippine Navy and a graduate of the Philippine Military Academy (PMA); and it is highly expected that his role at the DOE will be to take the forefront of ensuring security concerns of the country’s vital energy installations.
A fifth Energy Undersecretary is also expected to be appointed – and that candidate is lawyer Josefina Patricia “Ina” Magpale-Asirit, a former Commissioner of the Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) and a former Energy Undersecretary under the Aquino administration.
There are no specific roles assigned to the Energy Undersecretaries yet, but it is deemed that incoming Undersecretary Sales will be in-charge of the upstream oil and gas ventures, and that may include oversight of the ongoing sale of the operating stake of the Malampaya gas field.
The DOE, under the current Marcos administration, as earlier sounded off by Lotilla will push for amendments in the Electric Power Industry Reform Act (EPIRA) to make the law more attuned to the evolving needs and fast-paced transformation of energy investment landscapes.
Lotilla has stipulated that the tweaks in the EPIRA must “allow the Energy Regulatory Commission to play a more effective role in levelling the playing field for investor and to ensure a competitive market, which is a very important role in order to attract investors.”
The energy chief similarly stated the need to actively pursue the energization of all households nationwide, so all Filipinos can finally gain access to a very basic privilege – which is access to electricity service.
Lotilla similarly noted that the current government leadership will aggressively stimulate capital flow in the upstream oil and gas sector – and the DOE intends to have that concretized by fixing the policy regime of investments in the industry.
Another focus of the Marcos administration is to whet the appetite of investors in the renewable energy sector – and one policy approach being pushed is to relax ownership restriction for foreign investors.
Relative to the targeted massive-scale RE investments, the energy chief emphasized the need to “strengthen our transmission lines – it’s because we want to avoid the phenomenon of stranded power;” hence, avoiding the predicament suffered by solar power producers in Negros in which
they were not able to inject their generated electricity into the grid. ###