Last Monday, a spokesperson for Sunwest Water & Electric Co. (SUWECO) deflected blame for the eight-hour rotational brownouts and unloaded it all on the electric cooperative for acting too late on signing a new Emergency Power Supply Agreement (EPSA).
The island grid’s only power supplier said the management and the Board of Directors of the First Catanduanes Electric Cooperative, Inc. (FICELCO) should have done so six months before the EPSA 1 expired.
It particularly pointed out that its May 11, 2026 request for the extension of EPSA 1 addressed to the Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) was also very late in the day, coming just a few days before the May 15 expiration.
The Commission said that the rules state that the one-year EPSA is non-extendible and that a new deal should be negotiated prior to the expiration.
This is quite contrary to the National Power Corporation’s advice, when it refused to take on its role as Supplier of Last Resort upon request of FICELCO, that the latter explore the possibility of the EPSA 1 extension to forestall expected power interruptions.
Now, SUWECO cannot exactly escape blame responsibility for how things turned out for the cooperative and its 62,000 member-consumer-owners.
According to reliable sources inside Marinawa headquarters, SUWECO indicated that it would not join the negotiations for EPSA 2, the invitation for which was published in the FICELCO website two weeks earlier.
It would have been an easy thing to do as the six gensets they brought in for EPSA 1 were still running at the nearby power plant.
The reasons for their not wanting a new EPSA are obvious.
One, they have been having problems with their cash flow for weeks earlier, running short of money with which to buy the estimated 400,000 liters of diesel fuel needed to run its gensets 24/7 for a week.
In fact, it sought the assistance of FICELCO in persuading NPC to release its delayed collection of the Universal Charge for Missionary Electrification (UCME) and more than P400 million in collectibles being contested by NPC at the ERC.
Apart from coordinating with officials of the NPC, ERC, the National Electrification Administration (NEA) and the Department of Energy (DOE), the cooperative even went further and advanced its payment of SUWECO’s monthly power billings ahead of the due date.
Second, there is nobody authorized by the SUWECO board to sign a new EPSA or even enter into a agreement with Philippine National Oil Company (PNOC), NPC and FICELCO for the former to supply discounted diesel fuel as recommended by the DOE as a response to SUWECO’s cash flow problem.
Most of the SUWECO board members are either abroad or are in hiding after their boss – resigned House Appropriations Committee chairman and Ako Bicol partylist Rep. Elizaldy Co – was implicated in the flood control project anomalies.
And how exactly did the people of Catanduanes get dragged into this miserable situation in the first place?
Look back as far as 2014, when the then FICELCO Board of Directors and SUWECO officials signed the 1st Amendment to their Electricity Supply Agreement (ESA).
In March 2015, the 1st Amendment was submitted for approval to the ERC and three months later, the Commission authorized the two parties to draw power from the 5mW Solong Diesel Power Plant but at a higher True Cost Generation Rate (TCGR) for failure to comply with the Competitive Selection Process (CSP) which is a pre-condition for entitlement to the UC-ME subsidy.
A year later, FICELCO complied with the CSP requirement but it would take six more years, in 2022, before ERC would approve the 1st Amendment and allow SUWECO to claim the subsidy reckoned from March 2016, the time FICELCO complied with the CSP requirement.
But just a month later, the two parties inked the 2nd Amendment covering the provision of additional diesel gensets with a capacity of 6.6 megawatts, with the board seeing no need to have it subjected to the CSP as it did not require the cooperative to purchase electricity from the new set of gensets in excess of its requirement.
It only obliged FICELCO to inform SUWECO of any additional demand for electricity and the latter is obliged to provide the same.
But just like in the 1st Amendment, the ERC ruled that the process it underwent did not comply with CSP guidelines and, in January 2024, finally declared the SUWECO power plants at Viga and Marinawa ineligible for the subsidy.
It was this setback that led to EPSA 1 with its higher True Cost Generation Rates, with the situation worsened by the freezing of SUWECO bank accounts by November 2025 due to Zaldy Co’s involvement in the flood control scams.
SUWECO is now making excuses for what has happened in the past 12 years by washing their hands and shifting the entire blame on the current FICELCO management and the board.
To borrow Plutarch’s astute observation, to find fault is easy; to do better may be difficult.