(Continued from July 15, 2018)
IT IS ONLY in recent history wherein mankind has learned to capture the sun’s energy by way of solar panels. Before that however, ever since the earth was created, trees already had the capability to capture the sun’s energy by way of storing it into its roots, trunks, branches and leaves.
Ever since the beginning of civilization, man has been burning wood and other tree parts for fuel, and that has not stopped until now. While it is true that the indiscriminate cutting of trees for fuel is wrong, there is nothing wrong with growing trees for fuel, as long as the mountains are reforested as fast as the grown trees are harvested. You may not have heard about it yet, but dendro-thermal is a reliable and sustainable source of energy, more popularly known for its gasifier engines.
Perhaps it is just the way the government is organized, because the National Irrigation Authority (NIA) does not think about generating power, and the NEA does not think about generating water.
I can understand how difficult it is for some people to think out of the box, but I think it would not be too difficult for NIA to produce power, and it would not be too difficult either for NEA to produce water.
As we already know, even slow water currents could already produce hydropower, so why can’t the NIA also produce energy as it distributes water for irrigation?
As we also know, it is only the cost of energy that makes water filtration and desalination uneconomical. As soon as energy costs go down however, water filtration and desalination would become more practical, so why can’t the NEA also produce water as it produces power?
Talking about practicality, it is definitely more practical to collect and filter rainwater before it goes into the sea, because once the water is in the sea, it would cost more to collect and desalinate it back into fresh water.
In a radio interview, a government official said that “it only floods when it rains”. Another one said that “it only floods because there is no drainage.”
Even if I could not fathom the wisdom of what they said, I would be willing to say that it does not have to flood when it rains, if only we could collect the water as it rains, at least the water that are not collected into the dams. I would also be willing to add that if we are going to invest more money in adding more drainage structures, we might as well drain the water into cisterns where we could filter these right away into clean and potable water.
Going back to the subject of localizing water management, why not enable the provincial governments so that they could generate their own water supplies?
And since the LWDs are already in place, why not give them the task of water transmission and give the task of water distribution to local water cooperatives?
For whatever it is worth, the division of functions in the power sector is working very well, except for a few wrinkles. There are companies that do the power generation; one company does the power transmission while the electric cooperatives do the power distribution in the areas where MERALCO has no franchise.
As I see it, it would also be practical to enable the provincial governments so that they could generate their own power, while encouraging local companies to invest in local power transmission.
And since the local electric cooperatives are already in place, let them keep the power distribution business because that is where they are good at.
Also for practical reasons however, the power generation in the provinces should shift towards renewable and sustainable energy sources such as solar, wind, hydro and dendro sources.
Talking about dendro, it is not enough to plant trees, because nourishing them and growing them is the harder part. Aside from producing oxygen, we now have two other reasons to grow trees, and that is to generate water and energy locally./PN
