Justifying New Tariff is misleading and mischievous

Yoong hands memorandum to
SESB Security Manager, Azmi Azman

Letter from SAPP Youth to Tan Sri Leo Moggie, Chairman of SESB

SESB New Tariff effective 15 July 2011

We write to record our objection to the SESB new tariff effective 15 July 2011 which, according to some calculations, is 15% to 24%. You claimed that the new tariff will not affect the majority of the people. In fact, the new tariff will impact on every person, some directly as consumers and some indirectly when the costs of living and costs of economic production shoot up.

Your full page advertisement in newspapers July 10 to justify the new tariff is misleading and mischievous. The advert fails to convince the people in the same way that your newspaper advertisements in the last few years on the proposed coal power plants have also failed to convince the people.

For instance, you justify the increase in electric tariff by comparing Sabah’s new tariffs with that of Thailand, Hong Kong, Singapore and Philippines. But you failed to mention that these countries are not oil producing countries. Whereas, Sabah is a net exporter of both oil and gas which we are not allowed to use for our own power generation. The huge profits from our oil and gas have not been used to benefit Sabah’s energy sector and the people.

You claimed that Indonesia has lower tariffs because Indonesia subsidises USD 5 billion to USD 7 billion per annum. But you think the people of Sabah do not know that archipelagic Indonesian population is ten times that of Malaysia. You mention that Sarawak has lower tariffs than Sabah because “Sarawak’s cost structure is lower than Sabah due to cheaper gas and coal price.” But, like Sarawak, Sabah has our own natural gas. Why would SESB be paying more for our own natural gas than Sarawak does? As for coal, newspaper reports that the prices of coal has gone up (not come down) due to natural disasters in Australia and other countries. This was the excuse given for the reduced losses of Tenaga Nasional Berhad.

You claimed that Sabah’s SAIDI (System Average Interruption Duration Index) has improve tremendously over the last seven years. This is because the SAIDI was so very bad (at 3996) in the first place. According to you, Sabah’s SAIDI today is 288 which you consider to be very good. But the Peninsula Malaysia SAID is a low 87 and Putrajaya is a mere 33! Sabah’s electric power outages is 3 times that of the Peninsula and 9 times that of Putrajaya. There is nothing for

SESB and TNB to be proud of. The consumers and the economy of Sabah have suffered so much but none of these losses have been compensated by SESB or TNB. But when power outages occur in the Peninsula Malaysia, compensation was paid to commercial consumers.

We call on SESB to be fair to the people of Sabah, to provide reliable electric supply at reasonable costs.

We call on SESB to use more of our own natural gas for power generation, to cut wastages and corruption and to improve efficiency. We do not agree that SESB has sufficient justification to increase the electric tariffs.

EDWARD DAGUL
Youth Chief