Makati Mayor and United Opposition (UNO) vice presidential candidate Jejomar C. Binay Thursday warned the Arroyo administration against resorting to “midnight power assets deals” as brownouts started hitting Luzon.

Binay said the brownouts in Luzon and the power outages that have pestered the Visayas since last year underscore the need for a sustainable, long-term energy policy that is anchored on tapping “clean” power sources.

“It would soon be lights out for the Arroyo administration but who would have thought that it would end its nine-year run by throwing us all into darkness, literally,” he said.

Binay stressed that it has always been convenient for the national government to justify power generation deals since the country has always lacked enough generating capacity to meet demand but this also led to “switching on midnight power deals that are hatched in the dark” and whose stranded costs continue to burden taxpayers.

Rather than continue to be hobbled by rotating outages, Binay said the country should craft a doable and viable energy policy on account of the frail energy infrastructure.

“Ironically, the blackouts are shining a bright light on an area that needs to be addressed, that we need to shore up our installed energy capacity,” Binay said, noting the crippling power shortage in the Visayas as a prime example of a weak energy policy.

The Visayas has long been hit by rotating brownouts as energy demands of a burgeoning population outstrips energy streams to the islands, he added.

“But as the country scrambles to beef up its energy capacity, we must start working on generating plants that use renewable energy like geothermal fields and away from dirty coal plants that leave both a huge carbon footprint and bills for coal whose steady supply and price can’t be guaranteed,” Binay said.

The opposition leader has been an advocate of promoting investments in geothermal energy, saying the country has the second largest source of geothermal power in the world.

Promoting the country as a haven for “clean power” would also serve to attract companies who have made it a policy to look for investment locations that offer clean energy sources, he added.

Another advantage of clean energy plants is that their fuel, being free, are isolated from the vagaries of the market, “thus guaranteeing predictable costs unlike previous Independent Power Plants (IPPs) whose yields were priced based on prevailing oil price.”

Binay said stranded costs of IPPs continue to saddle the country, “on account of the ‘take-or-pay’ provisions in their contracts, which meant that electricity not used or even generated ended up being paid for.”

One computation by the Power Sector Assets and Liabilities Management Corp. (PSALM), pegged at P470 billion the residual debts the National Power Corp. (Napocor) has left behind.

“The PSALM had said that the projected level of Napocor debt is P470 billion, an amount which has already taken into consideration privatization proceeds and revenues for the period,” Binay said. “Worse, these debts will be amortized by the Filipino people, through a universal charge that will be a regular feature of monthly electricity bills of consumers until 2025.”