The Senate Committee on Energy will investigate the rotational brownouts affecting Luzon, to find long-term solutions to the outages that occur during the summer, its chairman said.
Sen. Sherwin Gatchalian said the Department of Energy should ensure the quality, reliability, security and affordability of electricity in the country. He said the department should be held accountable for its "failure to address power supply shortages since 2016."
Rotational brownouts in Luzon began on Monday after the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines issued yellow and red alerts due to insufficiency of power supply. This could persist for several days, the NGCP said.
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Gatchalian said that during the committee's hearing on April 27, the DOE assured lawmakers that there was no high risk of supply shortage during the summer season, and yet many areas in Luzon experienced rotational brownouts this week.
"It is crucial for the DOE to provide long-term solutions to this problem and a specific timeline for these plans, to include the hastening of the build out of new power plants, aggressively utilizing energy efficiency and conservation, and contracting sufficient ancillary reserves," Gatchalian said in a statement.
"All these things are necessary to protect the public and the economy from losses due to power outages and the resulting high prices of electricity due to limited power supply," he added.
