The Philippines Makes It to Washington Post's Front Page

The Philippines is steamin'!

This is an article that highlights the rich natural heritage God blessed and entrusted us with.


RP makes front page of Post
By Jose Katigbak STAR Washington bureau
Monday, October 6, 2008


WASHINGTON – It’s not often that good news from the Philippines makes a prominent splash in a major US daily, but a story on the billions of dollars saved by the country because of its use of geothermal power as an indigenous energy source was on the front page of the Washington Post on Saturday.

Ever since the early 1970s when then President Ferdinand Marcos created a major government program to find, develop and generate electricity from hot rocks deep in the ground, successive governments have championed this form of alternative energy despite revolutions and widespread corruption, said the report from Ormoc written by Post correspondent Blain Harden.

In installed geothermal power capacity, the Philippines ranks No. 2 in the world, narrowly trailing the United States, which has far more geothermal potential, far more engineering talent and far greater demand for clean sustainable power, it said.

“But unlike in the Philippines, government policy in the United States has been inconsistent,” the report said.

Geothermal power now accounts for about 28 percent of the electricity generated in the Philippines.

With 90 million people, about 40 percent of whom live on less than $2 a day, the Philippines has become the world’s largest consumer of electricity from geothermal sources and billions of dollars have been saved because of reduced need for imported oil and coal, said the report entitled “Filipinos draw power from buried heat.”

“The Philippines would be in hugely worse shape without geothermal as an indigenous energy source,” Roland Horne, a Stanford University expert on geothermal power who has visited the Philippines more than 20 times, told the Washington Post.

The daily said the showcase of the country’s long-term commitment to this alternative source of energy was in Leyte, where a government-created company, now privatized, has carefully transformed a vast geothermal field into the linchpin of the country’s electricity grid.

It quoted experts as saying that Leyte, if it continues to be well managed, should produce electricity for centuries.

The United States has the world’s largest geothermal resource, the Geysers, 72 miles north of San Francisco, but it has not been nearly as well managed as Leyte, according to Horne and other experts.

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