The great brownout of August 21-22 for those who live in the Alijis area of Bacolod must’ve been quite an eye opener for those who thought that the sale of the electric cooperative formerly known as CENECO to a private company owned by a tycoon who has lately been gobbling up lucrative distribution utilities all over the land would magically make things better.
The update from the new guys in charge, Negros Power, is that it will take two weeks to replace a damaged transformer at the Alijis substation, which means that until then, the possibility of manual load dropping, or commonly known as “more brownouts” will be very high. The blame, of course, will most likely be passed on to CENECO for failing to properly maintain the transformer that failed spectacularly, but the timing and the ensuing PR disaster is now Negros Power’s problem. It’s a shame that they just officially earned their franchise and started operations.
For most consumers, it doesn’t really matter who owns the distribution utility. What is important is the quality and reliability of the service it delivers. And given its performance for the past few years, CENECO certainly deserves all the brickbats that have been thrown its way. One might say that the recent failure of this 13-year-old transformer, which if you come to think of it, would be totally a CENECO responsibility, is proof of the mismanagement that made its sale a deserving one.
Whatever the problem, JVA is done, the sale finalized, the new franchise granted to the new owner. It is now up to billionaire Enrique Razon’s Negros Power to deliver on the promise of better service, while at the same time rolling in the guaranteed profits that CENECO could’ve, would’ve, and should’ve earned under what has always been a highly profitable business model, only if it were only properly run, instead of being run to the ground.
While we are on the topic CENECO being run to the ground, the nagging question in my mind all throughout this JVA/takeover brouhahaha, and up to now to be honest, was whether our cooperative’s decline has been out of pure incompetence, which while horrible, cannot be as bad as the other possibility I have often thought about: which is if there was malice involved. What if the poor service we have been subjected to these past few years was intentional, so the coop’s own owners would turn against it, or at the very least, be apathetic about it being sold to any bidder conveniently waiting in the wings, not even the highest one.
I remember mocking CENECO when it claimed to be a AAA cooperative because I believed that the quality of its service didn’t match the rating. The electric cooperative we formerly owned, which is classified by the National Electrification Administration (NEA) as “MEGA LARGE” (i.e. a golden goose or cash cow), was rated AAA from 2016 to 2021.
Note that the Triple A Category is the highest rating given by NEA to Electric Cooperatives who have “performed excellently in its operations, and have been compliant to its Financial, Institutional, Technical and Reportorial standards.” We were owners of a cooperative that was rated Triple A and classified as Mega Large. Operative word here is “were” because this year, we thought of nothing about giving it away.
Interestingly, in 2022, just as whispers of a JVA started rising, CENECO was still Mega Large, but the AAA streak ended and it was only rated AA. That is a marked decline and whether it was happening for a profitably insidious purpose or not, we can only speculate, but by 2024, it had been JVA’d and sold, with its own board of directors and management team leading the charge, instead of defending the cooperative they had been entrusted with from a corporate raider. A pretty smooth one, if I have to say so myself…
As members of a cooperative, we were part of the ownership of CENECO but we soured on it, maybe justifiably so. We long tolerated the sort of management that was either poor in capability and vision; and in the end, had one that was more interested in selling what was a poor but still valuable (MEGA LARGE, recently AAA) electric cooperative. Whatever the case, we didn’t value our ownership of the cooperative, so now we don’t have any part of it. We just pay the bills and hope for the best from the new owner who ditches the non-profit part of the cooperative equation, and makes profit the ultimate goal.
However, if you come to think of it, whether CENECO was sold or not, we were already apathetic co-owners. We tolerated mediocrity, didn’t care about the board of directors, complained loudly yet didn’t make the most of our ownership stake. Perhaps a more capable and professional management team could’ve saved it without having to sell it, but we honestly didn’t think it was any of our business to care and act. Just complaining on FB was enough.
Even if it got sold, most of us probably don’t care, as long as there is still electricity. If the new owner can reduce the brownouts, we may even prefer it that way. After all, if we were so apathetic that we didn’t really get anything extra from being members of the Central Negros Electric Cooperative, then we probably didn’t lose too much from simply looking on as the supposed stewards, instead of taking care of it, instead sold it off, right?*
