For a good night’s sleep, Vera Tudela, 24, her boyfriend and their three young children including a two-month-old baby would stay inside their cramped Sedan where the air conditioner is on, instead of sleeping inside their dark and humid house.
Because of severe power outages on the tropical island of Saipan, sleeping inside air-conditioned vehicles has become a common practice among families with no backup generators at home. Some villages also have no water for days.
“There’s five of us in the car. We have to do that to make sure our kids could sleep comfortably,” Tudela, of Koblerville, told ISLANDS BUSINESS while cradling her youngest child at a September 17 rally calling for United States intervention in the Saipan power crisis.
At the peaceful protest demanding “reliable and powerful power for all,” Tudela’s 18-month-old son in a stroller holds a placard that says, “Intervention today for a better tomorrow.”
At the worst stage of the power crisis on Saipan, the capital of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), power would go off up to four times a day. One outage would last from one to eight hours.
“Where else in America can a two-year-old have a concept of power outage?” another young mother told the crowd at the rally, pointing to her daughter who would always tell her that “there’s no power again, ma.”
Saipan’s power crisis reached the White House as CNMI Resident Representative to Washington, D.C. Pete A. Tenorio called on US President George Bush to intervene.
Thousands of petitioners on Saipan are asking the president the same thing.
Power would go off any given time regardless of the power outage “schedules” released by the Commonwealth Utilities Corp. (CUC) regularly.
CUC is an autonomous government agency charged with managing and operating power, water and wastewater systems in the CNMI.
The power outages stem mostly from aging power generators that are now malfunctioning and breaking down, coupled with the inability to buy costly diesel fuel to run the engines.
Approximately 41 megawatts are needed to power Saipan 24 hours a day.
But the three power plants have provided the island 19 to 28 megawatts a day during the last few months.
On August 1, CNMI Governor Benigno R. Fitial declared a state of emergency for CNMI citing that one of the power engines at CUC’s Power Plant 1 could explode at any time, maiming or killing power plant workers.
The disaster emergency, however, was not announced until August 14.
No power, high bills
The governor cited CUC’s inability to provide critical power generation service to CNMI and the apparent “extreme, immediate threat such condition poses to the Commonwealth,” including a lack of power to pump and purify water and pump or treat sewage.
Besides the on and off power, consumers also have to contend with CUC’s power rates that have gone up by over a hundred percent.
Local residents and visitors say there’s barely power at their houses.
And during times there’s power, they conserve as much as they can like limiting the use of air conditioners and other appliances.
But still, they get much higher power bills than in previous years.
Businessman Robert Russel, who has been on Saipan for 17 years, told the crowd at the power crisis protest that almost all of his employees’ paychecks go to paying for CUC power and little is left for other basic necessities like food.
But as former CNMI Supreme Court Justice Jose S. Dela Cruz said, “the absence of reliable, efficient and quality service has now been the real cause of the public frustration with the power utility (CUC)-not so much the power rate.”
He added, “The power blackouts have nothing to do with the price of crude oil; it has everything to do with expertise and competence in managing and operating a reliable power utility system.”
For a United States territory like the CNMI, having thousands of airline passengers stranded at the Saipan airport because of power outages is hard to believe.
The major airport’s two backup power generators have been down due to needed costly repair.
The CNMI’s already fragile tourism economy is expected to lose more due to the energy crisis.
The island’s unreliable power supply is also turning off prospective investors. Businesses with no backup generators had to close for several hours a day until many of them had to let go of employees for lack of business income to pay them.
Others had to shut down permanently. Small to big businesses had to increase their product and service costs to recoup losses brought by high power bills and frequent outages.
Classes in some public schools had to reopen a month later because of lack of reliable power.
The police force had to detail police officers at major intersections to regulate traffic as traffic lights are useless when power is off.
‘No more power crisis’
Before the planned public rally against unreliable power, the CNMI executive branch said the protesters’ concerns about frequent power outages have already been taken care of.
CNMI Press Secretary Charles P. Reyes Jr. referred to the 16 rented Aggreko generators that were turned on five days prior to the Sept. 17 rally.
The governor said the use of the Aggreko generators, which could provide 13 megawatts of emergency power to Saipan, will give the island at least a year of breathing room. The Aggreko generators, government officials say, will provide the island with 40 to 41 megawatts of power daily.
CUC engines at the power plants can now be rotated, allowing time for more maintenance and repair.
Some leaders and residents say it is important to remember that the rented generators are a temporary solution to Saipan’s power problem.
The governor recognises this, as he said that the ultimate goal is to provide cheap and reliable power. One option, he said, is privatisation which his administration is looking at.
A 16-year-old high school student, Maryana Gramlich, told Islands Business that it is “crazy that we have to pay over $500,000 a month for generators that we don’t own.”
The government, she said, “is not looking at other sources of cheaper generators”.
CUC’s contract with Aggreko calls for $6 million in payment for the generators with a downpayment of $1.5 million for the initial shipment. CUC must pay Aggreko over $500,000 every month.
But the protesters on Sept. 17—led by Independent Representative Tina Sablan and private citizen Ed Propst—are calling for lasting solutions to Saipan’s power problem rather than rely on what they call “band aid” solutions like renting power generators from Aggreko.