A professor and a former official of the company – Dr. Fernando Martin Y. Roxas – was designated by Malacanang as president of National Power Corporation (NPC), a state-run company which has been vested with a residual function of electrifying the off-grid areas.
Before the power assets of NPC had been privatized as mandated under the Electric Power Industry Reform Act (EPIRA), Roxas has been the head of the power firm’s Privatization and Restructuring External Office (PREO), an entity which helped in crafting the propounded policies for the passage of the law on the power industry’s deregulation.
It was the team of Roxas who worked with Congress during the deliberations of the EPIRA law; which is heralded as a bible not just of the overall divestment of NPC’s assets, but also in managing its liabilities as well as the all-encompassing restructuring of the power sector.
After his stint with NPC, Roxas has been a full-time faculty member at the Asian Institute of Management (AIM) since 2002; and he also clings to music as his diversion beyond his academic workload.
At NPC, he served as geologist and principal geophysicist for more than a decade – that was until 1990; or prior to his designation as the head of the power company’s PREO unit.
In an announcement made by the Department of Energy (DOE), it was stated that Roxas “will work in increasing access to sustainable energy in off-grid areas in the country and promote private sector participation.”
The state-run company holds the electrification mandate over the Small Power Utilities Group (SPUG), which delves with the energization of off-grid domains – prospectively with the investments that could be extended by qualifying third parties (QTPs) from the private sector players.
The major problem that will welcome Roxas in his new job is the worsening power service interruptions or blackouts that have been relentless afflicting consumers in these off-grid jurisdictions.
It has been revealed in various Congressional hearings that NPC is short of cash to fully fund its fuel purchases that are required in continuously servicing the electricity needs of the SPUG areas, but its P30 billion worth of pending applications for cost recoveries via the universal charge for missionary electrification (UCME) have not been acted upon yet by the Energy Regulatory Commission.
So far, the direction set out by Energy Secretary Raphael P. M. Lotilla will be for NPC to establish its credit line with the local banks; and for it to prospectively resort to borrowings to ‘manage’ its need for additional cash for fuel purchases.
Apart from the SPUG territories, NPC also has operation and maintenance (O&M) deal with its spin-off entity Power Sector Assets and Liabilities Management Corporation (PSALM) to take charge of the remaining unprivatized power assets of the government – including that of the Agus-Pulangui hydropower complex in Mindanao.