Participation in a Sustainable Energy Future

Today I was writing an accomplishment report for SWITCH. I handle the component on participative energy planning. The concept originally came about when members of Panay civil society groups contacted Prof. Rowaldo del Mundo of the University of the Philippines. They asked him how are power load forecasts made. They were concerned that local government officials were pushing for the installation of coal fired power plants in Iloilo. At this point, the relationship between civil society, the power sector and local government were already adversarial.

With these factors in mind, Prof. del Mundo developed a strategy to teach stakeholders how to forecast power loads and develop their own power development plan. Thus the Multi-stakeholder Power Development Plan (MSPDP) was born. The process was to 1.) teach stakeholder power forecasting, 2.) lead them to develop a long term regional outlook, 3.)formulate alternative scenarios favorable for each stakeholder group and 4.) statistically determine the optimal scenario for all stakeholders. While MSPDP was not completed. The result show that compared to other forecasts, MSPDP was the closest to Panay's actual power consumption in 2006 -2007








SWITCH will be continuing the work of MSPDP, through a compressed version of the process to be completed by Jan'09. Regional Energy Work Teams (REWTs) will be formed in other regions to receive the best practices of the pilot. SWITCH aims to enhance the existing Power Development Planning process by social mobilization by Feb. 2010.