Ben Kritz

I MUST begin this column by addressing the overwhelmingly sad news I received late Tuesday afternoon of the passing of The Manila Times’ chairman emeritus and one of my great mentors — really, more of an accidental stepfather — Dr. Dante A. Ang. I will at some point in the very near future write the personal memorial that he deserves, but I cannot now; the sadness is still too raw. One of DAA’s most useful pieces of advice to me, out of innumerable bits of wisdom he shared over the 13-plus years I knew him, was to get my emotional reaction to whatever topic was at hand under control before I wrote about it.

OVER the past couple of weeks there has been growing irritation with increasing electricity bills, with some lawmakers, ever ready to ride whatever wave of public attention is washing past them, chiming in to suggest various interventions, or at least conduct hearings on the issue. Not much has been accomplished yet, and if I was a betting man, I’d put my money on little to nothing being accomplished at all in the near term. The ongoing energy crisis has made it painfully clear that the existing legal and regulatory framework makes meaningful solutions impossible, and needs to be comprehensively overhauled.

I DO not like writing about or even spending much time thinking about politics. I do occasionally get into the subject, but usually under circumstances that I regret later: Either I am completely at a loss for a more productive topic and need to come up with something quickly, as happens from time to time here in these pages; or I’ve had an irresponsible number of evening drinks and have lost all inhibition, as happens probably more times than I’d like to admit in my own blog.

EARLIER this week, I happened to catch a Grab ride with a driver who had tuned in to the evening newscast on radio station DZBB. The top news was about the pathetic circus going on in the Senate, of course, but the next story, reported by a young-sounding woman, was about the power emergency that happened last week. This was all in tabloid-level Tagalog, which I didn’t mind, because listening to newscasts is one way to brush up on my language skills.

First of two parts ONE of our guest panelists at The Manila Times' auto forum on Thursday afternoon was Anthony Aucone, the principal of

IN a brief news item over the weekend, it was announced that the Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) has established a green energy auction reserve, or GEAR, price for the impending GEA for waste-to-energy (WtE) facilities. The GEAR price is essentially the ceiling price for electricity produced by facilities subject to the auction, and is intended as a guide to prospective bidders so that they can determine whether a project will be economically attractive or not. In this case, the ERC set the GEAR price at P9.2959 per kilowatt-hour (kWh), a price that was actually higher than it originally proposed, but is in the same ballpark with GEAR prices in previous auctions for solar and offshore wind.

MY good friend and colleague Noy Oplas, who writes for Philstar and BusinessWorld, introduced last week an intriguing and useful concept he calls the Oplas Index of Energy Abundance, or OIEA, which he says is pronounced “oh yeah,” because he’s kind of a character. It is a new way of looking at the relative energy profile of the country, and directly correlates to economic output. Noy suggests it would be a better guide to energy development policy than whatever the Department of Energy (DOE) is using now, which is mainly based on total generation capacity. The OIEA, by contrast, is based on generation output, which is a more effective indicator, particularly given the country’s ambitious renewable energy (RE) development goals.

IN my last column (“A better goal for energy expansion,” Sunday, May 31) I discussed the Oplas Index of Energy Abundance (OIEA), a metric developed