The government\u2019s previous effort to hire another independent power producer was a mistake, especially in light of the recent successive fuel price hikes, Gov. Juan N. Babauta said.<\/p>\n
According to Babauta, privatizing Saipan\u2019s main power plant, as contained in a Request for Proposal issued earlier by the Commonwealth Utilities Corp., is not the solution to island\u2019s power crisis, which is mainly caused by the worldwide increase in the cost of fuel.<\/p>\n
One alternative, he said, was for the CNMI residents to conserve electricity.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf the people of the Commonwealth cannot agree to pay more for electricity, then we must simply use less,\u201d Babauta said. He cited his administration\u2019s energy conservation program, which reportedly resulted in hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings for the government.<\/p>\n
The other alternative to raising rates was to find alternative technologies and or fuels for generating electricity more cheaply, he said.<\/p>\n
However, the governor added, \u201cOne certainty is that that request for bids for an outside investor to build an additional 30 megawatts of diesel powered power generation\u2014committing us to buying oil for another 20 years\u2014was a mistake.\u201d<\/p>\n
For this reason, he said, his administration did not follow through with the bids for another IPP. \u201cWe already have IPPs on Tinian and Saipan. They serve a purpose, but they are costly. That is not a model for the future,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The power plant privatization project would have involved the takeover of the eight-engine Power Plant I in Lower Base, its rehabilitation and upgrade to meet federal environmental standards, and installation of two new 15MW generators. The contract would allow the private company to operate the machines for 20 years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The government\u2019s previous effort to hire another independent power producer was a mistake, especially in light of the recent successive fuel price hikes, Gov. Juan N. Babauta said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-96362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96362","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96362"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96362\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}