The relationship between storms and a strong energy infrastructure
Last week, Severe Tropical Storm (STS) “Trami” (local name “Kristine”) dumped a huge volume of rainwater, knocked down many trees, electrical posts, and cables, and caused power blackouts or fluctuations in many provinces in the Visayas and Luzon.
From different press statements I gathered, here are what several agencies and utilities have done to help.
The Department of Energy (DoE): Its Task Force on Energy Resiliency (TFER) monitored and helped coordinate the energy sector which mobilized many resources to restore power across affected areas in Luzon. Teams of linemen, engineers, and technical personnel from electric cooperatives, the National Power Corp. (in off-grid areas), the National Grid Corp. of the Philippines (NGCP), Meralco and other private distribution utilities worked tirelessly to restore electricity in these areas. This includes the simultaneous clearing of debris, repairing of downed power lines, and rebuilding of damaged substations.
The NGCP: It has an Integrated Action Plan to respond to typhoons and other natural calamities, annual Blackout Drills to prepare for major system disturbances, an Overall Command Center during critical periods, emergency restoration systems (ERS), spare equipment including transmission line hardware, and choppers, ready for rapid deployment when needed.
The Manila Electric Co. (Meralco): As of Oct. 24, nearly 600,000 Meralco customers suffered from power interruptions as the storm badly affected parts or the whole of its franchise area in the provinces of Batangas, Cavite, Laguna, Quezon, Rizal, Bulacan, and Metro Manila. Non-stop work led to the restoration of power by Oct. 27. Meralco Vice-President and Head of Corporate Communications Joe R. Zaldarriaga humbly thanked their customers “for their patience and understanding. Our crews and personnel will not stop until power service has been fully restored to the remaining affected customers.”
GLOBAL COOLING AND DISASTER PREPARATIONS
The bulk of our disaster preparations are focused on “man-made” global warming and climate change. The main narrative is that the Earth is warming in a manner that some have described as unprecedented, unequivocal, and catastrophic, and which is leading to rising sea levels (as the ice in Greenland and the Antarctica is melting fast) and the flooding of low-lying cities and places.
I do not believe this is true.
Planet Earth is 4.6 billion years old and there have been many episodes of global warming that follow global cooling. For instance, prior to the Modern or 20th century warming, there was the Medieval Warm Period (followed by the Little Ice Age), and before that there was the Roman Warm Period.
What is actually happening is not the rise of sea levels but the rise of water levels in rivers, lakes, and creeks due to annual flooding. There has been more rain and thus floods, not less. And this is what we should prepare for more.
If we look at the history of El Niño (which is the result of a sea surface temperature or SST anomaly/variance of 0.50°C or warmer) and La Niña (an SST variance of -0.50°C or colder), the 1950s to ’70s had more periods of La Niña, while the 1990s and 2000s had more periods of El Niño. Then early this decade there was a prolonged, triple-dip La Niña, followed by a big El Niño and now we are back to La Niña, with projections that it will last until the middle of 2025. All this is official data from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology or BoM (see the accompanying chart).
From 2020 to 2022 in the Philippines, we had three years of no summer or dry season — it rained throughout all 12 months, as reflected in the triple-dip La Niña of those years. After the bad El Niño which ran from June 2023 to May this year, it has entered a neutral phase (an SST variance between +0.50 C to -0.50 C) with heavy rain since around June, and now we are entering La Niña again.
So we anticipate prolonged rains for the rest of this year until early next year. We expect more rain and flooding, not less, with possibly another year without summer in 2025 and beyond.
What to do in these periods of prolonged rain and flooding, this global cooling trend? Here are some measures we can consider.
1. Regular, annual dredging of rivers, creeks, and lakes. Make them deeper so they can hold more rainwater and thus minimize flooding.
2. Build more dams, weirs, man-made lakes, and other water catchments. Open-pit mining can help — the mined-out areas should not be covered with soil and planted with trees but instead be left as they are to become artificial lakes.
3. Our energy infrastructure should have endless capital expenditure (capex) upgrades. We should have redundancy in system reserves like substations and peaking plants which are unencumbered by price controls.
4. The Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) should expedite the approval of necessary capex upgrades. All regulated entities — private distribution utilities like Meralco, electric cooperatives, and the NGCP — need ERC approval for their capex projects. The delay in the approval of important projects (especially those damaged by typhoons and floods, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions), plus the business uncertainty of regulatory reset mechanisms, adversely affect supply, distribution, and transmission systems’ efficiency.
In the case of the NGCP, it has 115 pending capex applications worth more than P600 billion, of which seven have been completed. Under the Energy Virtual One-Stop Shop (EVOSS) law, regulatory approvals should be issued within 270 days. The NGCP says they have already infused P340 billion in capex since 2009 and they will infuse more.
And then there is a recent Supreme Court ruling that limits the NGCP’s ability to procure the right of way (ROW) for projects that are not ERC approved.
Our climate policies and energy regulation policies need a reboot. There will be strong storms again because those are part of nature, part of the natural climate cycle of warming and cooling. But the inconvenience and economic damage of those storms need not be repeated if we prepare for global cooling and have a strong energy infrastructure via regular and large capex projects that get faster regulatory approval.
Bienvenido S. Oplas, Jr. is the president of Bienvenido S. Oplas, Jr. Research Consultancy Services, and Minimal Government Thinkers. He is an international fellow of the Tholos Foundation.