Opening statement of Senator Win Gatchalian:
Committee on Energy second electric vehicles public hearing

Once again thank you very much for joining us this morning, this is actually the second public hearing on Senate Bill 174 but the Senate decided to merge four other bills that deals with promotion of electric vehicles and environmentally compliant vehicles. The other four bills were filed by Senator Recto, SBN 472 the other one is filed by Senator Recto again that deals with hybrid electric vehicles, SBN 479. The other one is filed by Senator Zubiri, SBN 538 and the other one, the last one, is filed by Senator Panglinan SBN 638. So, the Senate decided to merge all these bills, the four bills that I mentioned deals primarily with incentives that's why DOI plays a very big role in handing out incentives to electric vehicles, as well as hybrid electric vehicles, as well as what they call 'green vehicles.'

Since the bill was filed in the Energy Committee which primarily deals with ecosystem of the electric vehicles, we decided to merge everything so that we will have one comprehensive energy bill that will deal with the promotion of e-vehicles, the promotion of the ecosystem of the e-vehicles and granting of incentives to promote this type of technology. During the last hearing also, we have a lot of pending items that we want to expound on, we will deal with that later on as we go through one by one especially with the government offices.