Napocor’s inverse Robin Hood program

According to “Robin Hood” lore, the prince of Sherwood Forest stole from the rich to give to the poor. The inverse would achieve the exact opposite–to take from the poor and give to the rich. Allow us to import that irony to the National Power Corporation’s (Napocor) Universal Charge for Missionary Electrification (UCME)–a program initially designed for electricity markets unable to afford the high-power rates our economy is notorious for.

Especially ironic is where the poor effectively subsidize the rich following specific aspects of an old premillennial program that addresses importation-dependent fossil-fueled plants in Napocor’s Small Power Utilities Group (SPUG) operating in off-grid areas.

The original intent was to follow best practices where government subsidizes to assist missionary markets in off-grid areas. Unfortunately, succeeding distortions, the wayward diversions of focus, and the prioritization of nonmissionary entities had eventually led to where the subsidies were not only not provided by the government but where the largest beneficiaries were corporate giants.

In short, the eventual outcome now reeks of escalating callous structural economic inequity at a time when the public is already enraged at corruption-ridden infrastructure projects.

Allow us some specificity.

Last Sept. 11, 2025, Napocor’s newly appointed president and chief executive officer suggested that the agency needed greater infrastructure funding. The request harks to old programs to shift SPUG’s expensive fossil-fueled power plants to renewable energy facilities under a new power plant provider (NPP) program comprised of qualified third-party private power providers.

In the financial world, unless payables are identified as expenditures in government’s General Appropriations Act, debt servicing forms part of rate recoveries and is billed to the public. Requiring both increased taxes and budgetary allocations from the House committee on appropriations, this reflects an unfortunate default mindset characteristic among lawmakers.

The Napocor CEO, a former lawmaker like the current Department of Energy secretary, may want to hit the books, do the math, and view incremental infrastructure funding from the perspective of smaller albeit cheaper off-grid power providers who are effectively denied subsidies. This requires computing for the econometrics, specifically the input-output effect from the UCME from which subsidies are drawn.

The arithmetic is not rocket science. What is even easier is to quickly glance at the largest recipients of subscriber-provided subsidies to realize who the largest beneficiaries are compared to those least benefited or those effectively denied. Referencing a Gini coefficient hierarchy implicit in the UCME protocols the resulting inequity between the richest and the poorest reflects Napocor’s upside-down Robin Hood model.

First of all, debunking inception misconceptions, there are no government subsidies to close the gap between SPUG generating costs and generating rates. The UCME billed to both on-grid and off-grid subscribers is not a government subsidy. It is a direct tax on all metered subscribers who shoulder it, including off-grid missionary markets. As ludicrous as that sounds, that shows that those availing of missionary electrification are taxed for amounts that redound to them. The missionary market feeds off its own blood.

Napocor’s desperation is, however, understandable. The company has a current net deficit of over P2.0 billion. Never mind that in 2001 Napocor transferred over P830.7 billion of its debts and nonperforming assets to an agency that collects a universal charge for its stranded nonperforming assets. Despite such dramatic balance sheet cleansing SPUG cost-squeeze economics continue.

SPUG’s true cost generation rates vary per island. For most small islands, the TCGR is between P20/kilowatt-hour to P30/kWh. In the bigger islands where the larger corporate NPP operates the TCGR is between P13/kWh to P20/kWh. Note the inevitable net losses. For Luzon, the subsidized approved generation rate (SAGR) as imposed by the Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) is P7.39/kWh. For Visayas and Mindanao it is P8.2582/kWh and P7.0215/kWh, respectively. Do the math. Even with subscriber-provided UCME, net losses range from P4.75/kWh to P21.75/kWh.

This economic curse translates to insidious irony inflicted on efficiently operated off-grid power plants whose costs are kept below the ERC’s SAGR of P7.3 9/kWh. Because these power plant’s SAGR are below the ERC threshold they cannot draw from the UCME.

Irony turns into sociopathic cruelty and an allegorical Hood Robin reality. By analyzing the list of UCME beneficiaries from Napocor’s audited financial statements of the past three years, we will find that the largest beneficiaries of the subscriber-funded UCME subsidies are the large NPP and third-party ownership corporations operating in the SPUG areas.

Worse, one of these NPPs was incorporated by shareholders currently sought in connection with the billion-peso flood control scandals.

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Dean de la Paz is a former investment banker and economics professor.