Further to this, it is extremely difficult for Maynilad and Manila Water to get widespread planning approval for laying new sewage pipe, and it is almost impossible to find suitable sites to build large centralised wastewater treatment plants due to densely packed urban centers.
Excerp: In Manila, setting up sewer drains and sewer treatment plans is not just a matter of digging the roads and installing the pipes. Before the private water utility can so much as put a shovel in the ground, it has to secure permits and licenses with several local government units that are autonomous from each other in case the sewer pipes traverses multiple jurisdictions. It also has to coordinate with the national government if the affected road is a national highway. In the event of citizen complaints, the negotiation and arbitration process is expected to delay the project further.
On top of that the planning and implementation of telecommunications, power, road improvement, flood control and water projects, are all handled by different agencies and are disjointed and uncoordinated. A further set of constraints also exist in the construction of sewer treatment plants.
In metro Manila’s history there has been no shortage of efforts towards defining an effective urban planning approach for the country’s capital. But the legacy from its early years of urban planning is the piecemeal approach by which planning is handled. Multiple governments’ attempts at comprehensive urban planning met with a range of difficulties, so incumbents tried to go around obstacles by adopting remedial solutions rather than implementing the more predictive comprehensive urban planning approach. This is perhaps the precursor to the prevailing silo thinking and highly fragmented approach that the government has gotten used to.
The lesson from Manila is that cleaning up and rehabilitating the city’s waterways is a complex issue and a problem that can’t be resolved by the private sector alone.
There is plenty of opportunity for Fluence Aspiral as many new large-scale apartment complexes, shopping malls, universities, hospitals and hotels are building their own, on-site wastewater treatment plants. Having an on-site treatment plant is actually viewed favourably and listed as an amenity for residential complexes.
If Fluence can develop strong relationships with some of the leading property developers in the Philippines, it presents a lot of future opportunity. The Philippines has almost the highest commercial electricity prices in Asia, so the energy efficiency of Aspiral may play a role. Not to mention the low noise, odor and maintenance, with the flexibility of indoor/outdoor installation. There was a lot of chatter last year on HotCopper about the possibility of on-site installations in California business towers, but Philippines and its neighboring countries look like presenting a better short term opportunity.
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