Let’s start with the promise, because that’s how they soften you up. $40 to $70 billion in investment, up to 190,000 direct jobs, $200 billion in exports on 1,620 hectares in New Clark City. Who doesn’t want that? For once the pitch isn’t another call center boom. It’s taking our own nickel and copper and turning it into something worth more than dirt. It’s building chips instead of just assembling them. Brain gain instead of brain drain. If this lands, it’s the biggest structural upgrade this economy has seen in forty years. And for that alone, it’s worth doing.
Now the reality.
The hub will draw about 3 gigawatts at full build. There’s 500 MW of solar committed so far. Earlier projections ran as high as 5 GW, big enough that BCDA admitted it would have to look outside New Clark City entirely for power. Luzon’s peak demand sits around 14 GW. So call it a fifth of the island, maybe a third at the high end. In the country with the highest power rates in ASEAN. Where a decent thunderstorm still takes out a province.
If it’s starting to feel like we’ve seen this movie before, it’s because we have. And we financed it, too. So this isn’t me saying Pax Silica is bad for the Filipino people. It’s history saying it.
Take the Bataan Nuclear plant. A $2.3 billion build started in 1976, mothballed in 1986, finally paid off in 2007. ₱64.7 billion in principal and interest for a plant that never produced a single watt. We still spend ₱40 to ₱50 million a year maintaining the corpse.
Then there are the IPP contracts. After the 90s brownouts, government signed take-or-pay deals guaranteeing private generators payment whether they produced electricity or not. Renegotiation came and went; the take-or-pay provisions stayed. Then EPIRA made consumers absorb the difference through a universal charge. We’ve been paying that line item since 2013. Check your Meralco bill tonight. It’s still there. Thirty years later, you are still paying for somebody’s signature.
NAIA Terminal 3. Contract voided by the Supreme Court in 2003. A decade of arbitration. An empty terminal, and a settlement paid by people who never flew business class.
Yes, we have won some. Clark and Subic were dead American bases and today they employ hundreds of thousands. Geothermal made us a world leader. So yes, it can be done here. But nothing in our history comes close to this scale, and every comparable we have is smaller, or messier, or both.
And that is the part that stings. This is the price our leaders make us pay for their greed. Pax Silica could be the thing that finally lifts the Filipino up, and God knows I want it to be. But every time I let myself believe it, history presents the better argument. Flood control projects that existed only on paper while entire towns went under. Roads repaved three times in one year and still breaking apart. Billions moving through ghost contractors while the people who paid for it wade home through chest-deep water. This is why we can’t have nice things. It’s not the project. It’s the vultures circling it.
The pattern isn’t that these projects fail. It’s that the upside gets privatized and the downside gets socialized. Somebody signs. Somebody profits. Twenty years later a charge appears on your bill and nobody remembers whose name was on the pen.
The framework agreement is targeted for signing in November.
Before it is, one question deserves an answer in writing.
If the power doesn’t come, who pays for it? Them, or us?
History already knows the answer.
