“A push on energy-saving when there’s really nothing to save” will be the ironic theme walloping the celebration of Earth Hour in the Philippines this year, which will be marked once again with the Department of Energy (DoE) as spearheading entity.

The Philippines will be joining major cities in the world in the advocacy to save on electricity by switching off lights for one-hour on March 26 this year. The targeted participation in this initiative will be 1.0 billion people all over the globe.

The DoE announced the launching of this year’s Earth Hour Friday (March 12) at the Makati Shangri-La Hotel, cornering the participation of major stakeholders, primarily Worldwide Fund (WWF).

The celebration of this endeavor in the Philippines though will be revolving around different circumstances, especially since Mindanao, the country’s second major power grid is wrought with blackouts; and the two others are teetering at recurrent supply disruptions.

Such clearly entails then that the urgent call of the time is not even about saving, but for the government to ensure that there will be electricity supply flowing into the wires and delivered into homes and businesses.

The government’s failure in planning and the DoE’s micro-managing style already plunged the entire country into rotating brownouts; which was later replaced with spikes in electricity rates because the only solutions available were to switch to more expensive fuels.

The energy department, in its advisory to the media, vouched on the 10 million participation it cornered last year; yet industry players are gearing up for action that will truly resolve the current problem of the power sector.

Nevertheless, in the appraisal of global participation of last year’s Earth Hour, the Philippines is not even near in the list of major cities that made a mark in the celebration.

“For the past three years Earth Hour has inspired over a billion people in 1000 cities and towns worldwide to take a stand against climate change,” the DoE said. If truth be told, it had been the major cities like New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Sydney or Asia’s Tokyo, Beijing, Singapore, and Taipei that merited wider media attention Manila just treated as a small dot in the entire roster of world participants.

The DoE claimed that the Philippines ranked number one in terms of participation; yet that was never recognized as a fact in global appreciation of the event’s holding.

“Last year, over 10 million Filipinos in 647 towns and cities joined the global switch-off to prove that the country can unite for a common cause,” the energy department noted further.