The new leadership at the Department of Energy (DOE) will prioritize fulfillment of 100-percent electrification target on all households nationwide, a goal that the Duterte administration had failed to deliver.

“We’ve got to address the security, as we address as well the matter of protecting the most vulnerable sectors of society and we will continue to work on the targets for electrification of households all over the country,” Energy Secretary Raphael Perpetuo M. Lotilla said.

He specified that “there are still more than 1.0 million households which are unserved and more than 800,000 of those are in Mindanao.”

The Duterte administration initially eyed to complete energization of all Filipino households on or before June 30 this year, but budget constraints as well as policy and technical challenges in rolling out energization programs impeded that dream.

The past government leadership, in particular, had set sharp focus on energizing the ‘unserved’ and ‘under-served’ domains so these marginalized jurisdictions can keep pace with targeted inclusive economic growths for the country; but that remains an unfulfilled aspiration until now.

Last year, the National Electrification Administration (NEA) already sounded off that it has been falling short of its electrification target – even at sitio level because its budget allocation had been significantly slashed.

At the time, the national government has been realigning funds mostly for the country’s response to the coronavirus health crisis; and it was the State-underpinned energization program that had been whacked in the process.

In particular, NEA officials indicated that of the 12,000 sitios targeted for full electrification this 2022, the required funding will be as much as P18 billion -- but the allocation set by the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) had been below 10-percent of that or just around P1.627 billion.

In the agency’s calculation, the cost of connecting one sitio to the grid would be at P1.5 million; hence, the aggregate financing requirement of the 12,000 sitios will be as much as P18 billion.

A sitio is a unit of a barangay (village) – and these are often located in relatively far-flung areas, hence, providing electricity access to consumers on these domains would entail heftier capital outlay and there could also be higher degree of physical constraints in connecting them to the grid – and even more so, in extending energy access to the household level.

In a recent World Bank report, the Philippines is in the roll of countries where rural areas’ access to electricity is still wanting, along with other Southeast Asian nations Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar.