BY BELINDA SALES
TEN YEARS after Bohol was hit by the 7.2 magnitude earthquake and Yolanda smacked Bohol hard by disrupting our precious power supply originating from Leyte causing untold miseries in the lives and economic activities of Boholanos, Bohol’s newest power plant, the 87.2-megawatt diesel-fired power plant now on construction by the Energy Development Corporation (EDC) will begin operating on December 26, 2023.
During the forum Energy Climate Resilience in Bohol’s Power and Energy Sector held this week in Tagbilaran City, power stakeholders learned that EDC offered the mix of geothermal power derived from the Unified Leyte Geothermal Power Plant and this diesel power plant which will address Bohol’s acute power needs in times of power loss and disconnection from the Visayas grid through the Leyte-Bohol 138 kV submarine cable. Bohol is expected to keep its lights on with this new diesel power plant located in Imelda, Ubay, Bohol.
For details, the price components of the power supply contract are broken down into:
Base Price: P3.9612 per kilowatt hour (kWh); Weighted Base Price: P4.3402/kWh; Levelized Price: P4.3764/kWh; and Effective Levelized Price: P5.2168/kWh.
I understood during the forum that the power plant can operate as early as November, this year, and for me it’s a welcome development. As a stakeholder following this delayed and long overdue government action, I expect that this will deliver the goods.
In the area of renewable energy, the forum also highlighted the underutilized renewable energy sources in Bohol, even in the Visayas region, and advocates are pushing that Bohol tap into this potential.
As a millennial born in the wrong era, I am pleased that Gen Zs and Millennials are involved in the crucial issue of power supply reliability in tandem with climate resilience because we have seen how Bohol’s power supply is always the first to suffer during disasters.
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The glory of old age
By Rae Dawn Balagot Maestrado
I’ve been with plenty of aged women in my life, and I often enjoy beingin their company. As my mom would say, I’m“lolahon”or a grandma’s girl. They’re a joy to be around, especially when they start talking about old timestories. I swear, magic happens every time they recollect the old days. It’s like the glory years resurface to reveal a young person in front of me.
It’s odd how our society has come to despise looking aged.Isn’t it supposed to be a great thing to get old? Agedness isa testament of growth, wisdom, and resilience. Thankfully, it IS celebrated in small ways like being prioritized in most things (i.e., senior citizen lane, seating, benefits, discounts, etc.).
Moreover, being old means most people are nicer to you. Have you seen the way people treat old strangers? It’s delightful to see them offer their seats, carry things, or cross the streets with the elderly. Heck, most people’s tone of voice turns mellow when talking to someone older. Looking at it, being old naturally brings out the gentle side of most people.
However, all the old women I have chatted with exhale sighs of disbelief as they look at themselves. Even the least vain grandma I know wrinkles her brows and lets out a sigh as she sees the back of her hand. She looked beautiful though, as she did that with her platinum grays and thin streaks of ebony, the little craters in her face and the tags in her skin. She was lunar and earthly, as I would like to recall – in the glory of agedness.
Perhaps there will always be a slight dissonance in how young we feel inside and how old our bodies have become. Because people in their early twenties still feel like they’re seventeen or nineteen. Even my mom feels like she’s 19 still, even though she is already well into her 60s.
I think aside from the colossal marketing and long-run brainwashing we get every day from the beauty industry we chase youth because of what it is to us and not just what it looks like. For example,I read somewhere that we want things like a cool sweet lemonade, but it doesn’t taste the same because what wereally lookforissweet lemonade from five summers ago. Maybe for some, that was fifty summers ago.
Youth is so fleeting that once it’s gone, only do we realize that it has already bloomed. No wonder we yearn for it so much.
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Food for Thought
You still crave lemonade, but the taste doesn’t satisfy you as much as it used to. You still crave summer, but sometimes you mean summer, five years ago.- Alida Nugent
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The writer hosts Woman Talk with Belinda Sales at 91.1 Balita FM Tagbilaran City every Saturday, 2 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. She can be reached at . Twitter @ShilohRuthie./PN
