On coal, industrialization, and GDP expansion
September 30, 2025 | 12:02 am
My Cup Of Liberty
By Bienvenido S. Oplas, Jr.
https://www.bworldonline.com/opinion/2025/09/30/701706/on-coal-industrialization-and-gdp-expansion/
Three important energy events happened last Thursday, Sept. 25, that I want to comment on.
The first was the University of the Philippines-Los Baños (UPLB) “Enercon 2025” conference at Vivere Hotel in Muntinlupa City. The second was the signing of the PhilAtom law and the release of the Department of Energy (DoE) statement on nuclear energy. The third was the release of a statement from the Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) on attacks by the renewable energy (RE) lobby, coupled with some frantic articles by climate activists against coal.
At the UPLB College of Economics’ roundtable discussion, the speaker was former National Power Corp. (NPC) president, Guido Delgado, and his presentation was about the “financialization” of the electricity sector. He blamed economists for the finance sophistication in the formula and attacked the ERC’s performance-based regulations (PBR). Weird.
I spoke briefly and pointed out, among others, that the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) for intermittent solar and wind is not complete, it should consider the cost of ancillary services (AS) like batteries, or back-up diesel gensets, or hydro-pumped storage for use when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining. So LCOE plus AS equals the levelized full cost of electricity (LFCOE) — and this is not cheaper than coal or gas.
Then the DoE released a statement: “DoE hails signing of PhilATOM law.” In it Energy Secretary Sharon Garin said that, “The passage of RA 12305 strengthens the regulatory framework that will enable the safe and secure peaceful use of nuclear energy in the country.”
Days before that, on Sept. 19, the Philippines was elected to the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for the 2025-2027 term during the annual IAEA General Conference in Vienna, Austria. That is good news and I give my congratulations to Secretary Garin.
Then, during the weekly Open Meeting of the ERC, Chairperson Nino Juan took issue with the statement made by the Power for People Coalition (P4P) the other week. P4P Convenor Gerry Arances said in a Sept. 19 statement: “We are disappointed Chair Saturnino Juan’s first order of business as new ERC chief is to cede ground to power players, enabling them to raise prices as they please at the expense of ordinary Filipinos… Protecting consumer interests is not an optional duty for the ERC. It is its primary mandate — and part of that responsibility is scrutinizing these contracts to prevent abuses and ensure least-cost electricity.”
Mr. Juan aptly and correctly said that “the greatest shield against high prices is not the discretionary power of a regulator to cut a single contract, but the relentless, ongoing pressure of a competitive market where suppliers must constantly offer their best price to win a supply contract.”
I agree with him 100%. The most expensive electricity is no electricity, in other words, a blackout.
When power producers are constantly harassed by price controls, by the price dictatorship spurred by “People for Poverty” (my term for P4P) we will get what they want — electricity which is cheap but not available.
Several articles also came out again attacking coal as “dirty energy” and lambasting the local energy companies and conglomerates that have coal plants, calling themselves “investigative journalism.”
As I have pointed out many times in this column, the real “dirty energy” are candles and diesel gensets for lighting, and animal manure for cooking. When power is absent because the sun is covered by clouds and it rains, or when the wind does not blow for days, the poor are forced into using candles which can cause fires while the rich turn on their diesel gensets which are costly, polluting, and even noisy.
Papers that consistently attack coal as “dirty” are not investigative journalism, they are more “ideological journalism” pushing for global ecological central planning. See the global data in the table.
Many Asian countries that expand their coal use see their overall power generation increase, and their GDP size, valued in purchasing power parity (PPP), expanding significantly, creating more jobs, more industrialization, and more prosperity for their people.
In contrast, many European nations that deliberately cut their coal use have experienced an overall decline in power generation, like Germany, the UK, Spain, and Italy.
The anti-coal activists should aim their anger at China, the US, India, Australia, Japan, Russia, Indonesia, Turkey, South Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam whose coal power generation are much larger than the Philippines’.
Two coal power projects that should proceed in order to reduce the persistent yellow alerts in Luzon and Visayas are the Atimonan 1 Energy (A1E), a 1,200-MW super-critical high efficiency low emission (HELE) project in Atimonan, Quezon, and the Therma Visayas, Inc. (TVI) expansion in Toledo, Cebu. Visayas has the thinnest power reserves among the three grids in the country — almost all the business organizations in Cebu support the coal expansion there.
I was one of the panel speakers in the opening session yesterday of the 12th Monitoring and Evaluation Network Forum, organized by the Department of Economy, Planning, and Development (DEPDev) and held at the Crowne Plaza Manila Galleria. There was a big crowd, with participants mostly from different government agencies. My co-speakers in the panel — “To retain, redesign, or retrench?” — were DEPDev Undersecretary Joseph “Dockoy” Capuno, Department of Budget and Management Director Mary Joy de Leon, and Asian Development Bank Principal Economist Ashish Narain. The moderator was UP School of Economics professor Karl Jandoc.
Among the things I discussed was the institutional gap in promoting the rule of law — the law applies equally to unequal people and sectors. Like environmental protection. Before the motto was “Plant trees to save the planet,” now it is “Kill trees, build more solar-wind farms to save the planet” and it is ugly.
Later this week, on Oct. 2-3, the “Philippine International Nuclear Supply Chain Forum 2025,” organized by the DoE, will be held at the Grand Hyatt Hotel at BGC in Taguig City. I will attend and write about it here.
And a good observation from Bjorn Lomborg. The related article is here published last week, "Why Britain’s electricity bills are some of the highest in the world"
