Right now I am watching an ANC talk show discussing that China pretty well runs the electric grid here. They are wondering why why there has been a lot of brownouts recently.
The franchise ends 2058 and they are discussingif the gov't can get out of the agreement because of all the brownouts recently. The alternative is to have the gov't run the electric grid, as they did in the past.
the problem? China owns a large percentage of the franchise, the rest being owned by local businessmen
The 40 percent ownership of State Grid Corporation of China in the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) won’t pose a national security threat, the NGCP assistant corporate secretary told the Senate energy committee Wednesday.
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Watch the whole thing.
and a lot of senators (May 21 2023) want Chinese investors to be removed from owning the power grid.
the power company says no threat at all, and insists that the technicians running the grid are local Filipinos.
Problem? the manuals on how to do this are written in Chinese. (other reports say no, they have been translated into English or tagalog).
And although the corporation insists that China couldn't turn off the grid remotely, reports from a few years ago said actually they could.
China's State Grid Corp has a 40% stake in the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) - which runs the country's lone power transmission line. It transmits electricity all the way from Luzon - the northern end of the country - down to Mindanao in the south.On Tuesday, Senator Risa Hontiveros asked - given Chinese control of the NGCP - "Is it possible for our power grid to be taken down remotely?" ...(answer:) "Given the technological advancement right now in the telecommunications as well as in software, that is possible," he said.another problem: a lot of the technical manuals are written in Chinese (although this BBC article claims they have been translated).
many of the technicians back in 2015 were Chinese, but now we are assured that they have all left the country.
what is going on right now is a lot of brownouts, so the politicians are busy blowviating that this is due to evil China.
Except brownouts in May are normal, and may be getting worse, not beecause of evil China but because people are a lot richer than they were 20 years ago when I moved her. People are now more affluent and can buy airconditioners and the poor can afford electric fans and tvs and computers, and of course the population is growing. So there is a need for more electricity.
And since 20 percent of our electricity is hydroelectric power, which means they can't produce as much electricity when the water level is low, such as now, the end of TagInit, the dry hot season from Feb to May, before the monsoon starts in June.
But the backstory is that some politicians are seeing this as China sort of threatening the Philippines to stop them from helping Taiwan, and trying to intimidate the Philippines when we dare to defend our islands and fishermen in the West Philippine Sea as China becomes increasingly aggressive there.
and all of this is a minor footnote to the G7 meeting in Japan this week.
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