Populist promise, unfunded mandate
Filipinos have every right to be angry that they’re being billed for electricity siphoned off by illegal connections their utility failed to police.
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Filipinos have every right to be angry that they’re being billed for electricity siphoned off by illegal connections their utility failed to police.
There is a particular danger in political rhetoric that sounds unimpeachably fair until someone asks who actually pays for it.
President Marcos’ SoNA applause line — that Filipinos should no longer be billed for electricity that never reaches their homes — belongs in that category. It is emotionally satisfying and technically incoherent, and the gap between those two things is now Congress’ problem, the power industry’s problem, and eventually, inevitably, the consumer’s problem again.
Start with what system loss actually is — because the President’s framing obscures it. Some of it is theft and incompetence — jumper cables, tampered meters, cooperatives that have let their books go slack for decades.
That portion deserves no sympathy and should never have been passed on to paying customers in the first place.
But a meaningful share of system loss is simple physics: electrons meet resistance in copper wire, transformers bleed heat, and the farther power travels — especially into the archipelago’s remote and thinly populated corners — the more of it is lost before it even reaches a bulb.
Meralco chief honcho Manuel Pangilinan’s line about wires and resistance is not the self-interested griping of a utility chair protecting margins — it is Ohm’s law. Malacañang can order that cost off the customer’s bill; it cannot order it out of existence.
Which leaves exactly three places for it to land, and the administration has so far refused to name one. Consumers can keep paying for it, dressed as a different line item or folded quietly into generation charges — the same shell game Filipinos have learned to expect from every promised relief measure that comes without a funding source.
Distribution utilities and electric cooperatives can absorb it, which sounds appealingly punitive until you remember that more than a hundred cooperatives, many serving Mindanao and Visayan communities where losses run as high as 16 percent, operate on margins too thin to swallow tens of billions of pesos in newly unbillable costs without either collapsing or deferring the very infrastructure upgrades that would shrink system loss in the first place.
Or the government picks up the tab through a subsidy, which Palace officials have already ruled out — even as they insist, in the same breath, that neither consumers nor utilities should bear it either. That is not a policy. That is a wish, dressed in the language of policy.
The Energy secretary’s admission that this will take a year to sort out is the most honest thing said on the subject so far, and it should have accompanied the SoNA line itself rather than trailed it by 48 hours.
A serious version of this reform would have led with the hard part: an accounting of how much of system loss is theft versus physics, cooperative by cooperative; a financing mechanism — NEA loans, blended concessional capital, a phased subsidy tied to verified infrastructure upgrades — that doesn’t simply relabel the cost; and an enforcement regime against pilferage tough enough that cooperatives serving low-loss areas aren’t punished for the sins of the ones that let their lines rot.
None of these would fit in a SoNA applause line. All of it is the actual work of governing, as opposed to performing governance.
Filipinos have every right to be angry that they’re being billed for electricity siphoned off by illegal connections their utility failed to police.
However, anger doesn’t repeal thermodynamics, and a proposal with no financing plan isn’t relief — it’s a bill deferred, not canceled.
The instinct behind the reform is right: consumers shouldn’t pay for power that never reaches them. The execution is still missing its most basic ingredient — a name for who pays instead.
And in Philippine politics, a promise made before anyone answers that question almost always resolves the same way: quietly, and back on the consumer’s tab.
