People in the provinces bear the cost of a failing power sector

People in the provinces bear the cost of a failing power sector Just mention “Meralco”, “electricity bills.” or “higher rates” and the reactions are almost on cue: outrage, statements, hashtags. It is the most predictable rite of public discourse and has led much of the country to believe that our electricity problem starts and ends in Metro Manila. It does not. Consumers in Metro Manila will naturally complain about high rates and bad service. Politicians, of course, jump on these grievances – it’s their job, after all, to understand these issues and work to solve them legislatively. But almost always, the job is done only through with press release or social media post. Here their performance ends and the real problem remains. “Costly electricity” is a national malaise, not just a Meralco issue. In many provinces, consumers already pay rates similar to or higher than Metro Manila. That’s a nasty fact but it has been proven and is a burden often borne by households earning less than their Metro Manila counterparts. Many of these communities are also suffering from something more punishing and that is unreliable electricity. Brownouts are not just an occasional inconvenience, but a fact of life. For months now the Visayas grid has been placed on yellow alert, almost on red alert, with rotational brownouts fast becoming the norm. On prices, here’s the inconvenient truth that doesn’t fit neatly into a press release: the recent electricity rate increases were not the result of a distribution utility waking up one morning and deciding to charge more. The Independent Electricity Market Operator of the Philippines (IEMOP) said that the higher Wholesale Electricity Spot Market (WESM) prices were due to tight supply conditions, power plant outages and transmission constraints. These are structural, systemic factors that affect power systems across the whole country, not decisions made in a single boardroom. The Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) must supervise and strictly regulate the details of each of this . And sadly they are failing if not completely ineffective or inutile. If we want real solutions, these are the questions that deserve sustained attention—not just a news cycle. Why do supply shortages continue to drive prices up in the market year after year? Why is investment in new generation and transmission capacity always behind growing demand? What causes entire provinces to experience both high rates and poor service, the worst of both worlds, and to garner the least policy attention? And why does this structural problem get obscured while political grandstanding gets sustained, favorable coverage? Electricity is the easiest political talking point in the country because everybody pays for it. It makes for a good soundbite. That’s poor policy. Consumers need leaders willing to explain the hard, technical, unglamorous realities of the power sector—and then work to effect real reforms: faster entry of new generation capacity, real investment in transmission infrastructure and energy policies made for the long term, not the next news cycle. You don’t get cheaper power by always blaming one utility while ignoring the wider problems facing the whole electricity sector. It just makes the debate easier – easy for politicians chasing headlines, not for the families in Eastern Visayas trying to make ends meet around another red alert, or the household in Mindanao paying Metro Manila rates without its reliability. Affordable and reliable electricity is for every consumer, whether in Metro Manila, in the Visayas, in Mindanao, in the farthest reaches of the grid. It begins with the honest diagnosis, not with more blame. We must not leave anyone behind simply because they live in the most remote parts of the country. (next story) Water crisis In SJDM, Bulacan doesn’t go away with a name change For San Jose del Monte City citizens, water is not a topic discussed in courtrooms or boardrooms. It is whether a youngster may take a bath before school, if a sari-sari store remains open, or whether a home has to shell out money it doesn’t have for tanker deliveries because the tap ran dry again. That lived reality is exactly what is erased when a corporation decides its problems can be solved with new name or letterhead.PrimeWater Infrastructure Corporation is now Hiraya Water Corporation—hiraya meaning dream or aspiration. A strange choice for a company with a history of long interruptions, poor pressure, disputable billing and deteriorating infrastructure in San Jose del Monte. Hope is no rebranding. Hope is the water that reaches the third floor of an apartment in the morning at six.The company itself has conceded that the registration, rights, assets, liabilities and joint venture agreements are the same. With that admission, the debate should end over whether or not Hiraya can divorce itself from the failures of PrimeWater. It cannot claim continuity of contracts and discontinuity of accountability. Every unresolved complaint. Every unrepaired pipeline. Every bill in dispute under PrimeWater remains under Hiraya. Not a single peso, not a single day has changed. If the Lucio Co. group purchased the company as early as December 2025, San Jose del Monte residents should be informed of the accounting of an entire lost season in which new ownership, with presumably fresh capital, let the same interruptions and the same decaying facilities go unaddressed.So when the city government intervened, the company’s most visible response wasn’t a crew of repairmen. It was a lawsuit. The sequencing shows where its urgency really lives – not in the treatment plant, but in the court docket. And the venue selected deserves scrutiny. The controversy involves facilities and consumers in San Jose del Monte, Bulacan, but the cases were filed in Las Piñas — even as the company’s own board had already approved moving its principal office to Manila on May 11, 2026. Its petition before RTC Las Piñas Branch 198 was denied on June 2; a second case, raffled to Branch 253, was granted injunctive relief on June 8 — nearly a month after the board had voted to abandon Las Piñas as its official seat. If that transfer was not disclosed to either court, this is no technicality. It’s a question of candor to the very judicial system that the company invoked to retain control of water infrastructure serving thousands of households.Then came the July 8 notice to partner water districts, meant to announce “renewed hope” — except letters sent to other districts still referenced the City of Malolos Water District, an allegedly uncorrected copy-paste error sent to government partners overseeing public water assets. If the review process for an official notice can’t get the recipient’s name right, how much confidence should residents have in the review process for water quality testing or billing accuracy? The mistake is not the disease; it is a visible manifestation of the weak supervision and lack of professionalism the company is supposedly trying to shake off.Subtract the corporate maneuvering and try to figure out what this actually costs the households of San Jose del Monte: the money paid twice, the bill and the delivered or bottled water when the supply fails, the health exposure from the inconsistent quality of water, especially for children and the elderly, the hours lost to queuing for the water trucks instead of working or studying, the erosion of trust that comes from watching an essential-service provider take a community’s crisis as a legal problem to be litigated rather than an obligation to be met.Before Hiraya can claim the name it has chosen, it owes San Jose del Monte a full public accounting of infrastructure spending since the reported acquisition, disclosure of precisely what its lawyers told the Las Piñas courts about its principal office, individually corrected notices to every water district, and a dated, independently verified service-restoration plan. But the LWUA, the NWRB, the SEC, and the city government now have the authority to require those answers. Until then, the only thing that has changed in San Jose del Monte is the name on the door, not the water in the pipes. (end)