Asian Energy Advisors

An ERC “No Brainer”?

I was reading this post on How Law Schools are Using Twitter. It’s only three paragraphs – go take a look.

The Philippine Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) could have a single web page (a Twitter feed) for all their announcements.

And they could have a single web page (a Twitter feed) for posting links to each document (Decisions, etc.) they post.

And WE could all be updated in real time about all this.

But it’s only a no brainer if the ERC actually cares about enhancing public disclosure and promulgation of their material.

This entry was written by Nick Nichols, posted on Apr 11th at 1pm, filed under philippines. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

Nick Nichols

I have a hunch that the Commissioners, as a whole, perceive that it is not in their personal best interest for quick and full public promulgation of ALL of their Decisions, Orders, and Announcements. I think that is misguided, because the web allows us to talk about that in a way we could not do before. The sooner they move to timely disclosure, the better off for them (as well as us).

Certainly using Twitter won't make the rate setting process transparent. But it will open the door to, or put pressure on, increased transparency. At least we could get timely notifications of publicly released Announcements and Decisions. It won't prevent the Commissioner's from delaying posting certain Decisions to the web. And it won't make the Decisions themselves any more transparent than they choose to write up.

MrGam

Nick, on the other hand, ERC has the brains. If they used Twitter, that would make the rate setting process very transparent. Then they would not be able to make lightning speed decisions such as the one issued on March 23 on the reduction of the increase in the generation charge for the Visayas (reduce the increase? hmm). The hearings in Cebu ended in the afternoon of Friday and the decision was out on Monday. Could this have been done if the stenographic transcripts were posted as soon as they were fully transcribed? The posting of the decision would have been made earlier than the posting of the stenographic notes.