MEC’s 20th birthday: Make our Energy my good Chap
By ALLYSON MADSEN
Twenty years ago this week, Billy Roberts was at the airport waiting for a flight home. The company he worked for, International Power Engineering Systems Company (IPSECO) was pulling out because the company had gone bankrupt. He thought his Marshall Islands experience was over, when he was approached by Charlie Domnick, then Minister for Public Works, who asked him to stay.
“I had been an unofficial spokesman for the engineers, and he told me that President Amata Kabua wanted to pay me for one month while we had discussions about what to do next,” Roberts said. “I had to borrow a pair of long pants for my meeting with the President the next day.”
March 1 is the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the Marshalls Energy Company and coincides with Roberts’s role as general manager, although he started out as an engineer.
“When the President asked me to be manager in March of 1986, I told him, I’m an engineer; I don’t own a pen,” he remembered. “But Amata said to me, ‘Have a try. I’ll give you 12 months. If you fail, go home. If you don’t fail, we’ve got a company.’”
At the time, metering was limited to a small area around the power plant offices near what is now EZ Price. Billing was a creative process. “Jobo Lucky and Jemlok Titus were sitting at a table with the meter reading logs, a pencil and a calculator,” Roberts said. “I asked what they were doing, and they said, ‘meter readings.’ I asked how they could do that from here, and they answered, ‘we haven’t got a vehicle.’
“They were testing the new boss,” he said. “Then Jobo pointed to the log and said, ‘See this house? It has a dryer and air conditioning. That’s about $50,’ and he wrote a reading that matched that figure in the log.”
Within a few years, MEC had installed 1,800 meters, and read them every month. Sometimes they got a surprise. At one business, the owner had his staff install the meters upside down, so that they were actually running backwards, Roberts said. “After that, we put the meters in a case with a great big lock,” he said.
Working from an office above the post office, Roberts and his first hire, Justina Kilma, had a big celebration the first week that they collected $100. They ordered a pizza.
Today, MEC bills a total of $900,000 a month. In 1993, Roberts went to the government and asked that the subsidy to MEC be terminated. The company has been self-sufficient since then until 2004, when they showed a financial loss due to the dramatic increase in the price of oil. Since then, Roberts has negotiated a fuel contract with the Korean company SK Networks and created a floating tariff system that reflects changes, both up and down, in the price of oil.
Roberts said that about 20 of the 135 employees of MEC have been with the company since its inception in 1986. He is proud of the fact that all but four are Marshallese.
“We all learned the business together,” he said. “Now we consult for other companies in Micronesia. Justina Kilma went to Kiribati and installed the billing system at their energy company and trained them how to use it.”
One of the biggest challenges in the early days of operation was convincing Marshallese that they had to pay for electricity, when it had been free for years. “We got hate mail all of the time and two of my boys got beaten up and ended up in hospital,” Roberts said. “A few days later, some of the boys went back for retribution. The police came and threatened me, saying they would take care of things and to stop the vigilantes. But nobody got beat up again.”
According to Roberts, President Kabua set the example for paying electricity bills, telling him that no one was exempt. “I was sitting in a minister’s office one day after disconnecting him,” Roberts said. “The President walked in and asked what I was doing there. I told him the minister sent for me and he asked why.
“The minister explained that I had disconnected him for not paying. That’s the right thing to do, the President told me. An hour later, a check from the minister appeared across the desk at MEC.”
Roberts said that his goal for MEC over the next few years is to complete the solar project, with a solar panel and battery for every house on every outer island. He also wants to explore setting up small generators to power a single central building, like a school or meeting house, on every island that could be equipped with large freezers and computers.
MEC is also gradually moving its power cables in Majuro underground, to prevent outages from bad storms or the occasional car plowing into a pole.
Currently 85 miles of cable are underground, while 76 miles are still overhead. Roberts proudly points out that the longest island-wide blackout ever experienced on Majuro lasted just 24 hours – a record, he believes, in Micronesia.
In reviewing the past 20 years, Roberts said, “It has been a game of chess, but we are doing well.
“In many countries, utility companies are hated, but what we have tried here is to become a part of the community. Now, even when people come in to pay bills, I hear laughter.”