‘New policies will help PHL hit RE goal’

By Lenie Lectura @llectura

POLICY enforcement will play a critical role in achieving the 35 percent and 50 percent target capacity for renewable energy (RE) share by 2030 and 2040, respectively.

According to Department of Energy (DOE) Secretary Raphael Lotilla, the government is committed to hit those targets. “That’s the reason why we initiated a number of policies,” he said.

He was referring to the Green Energy Auction (GEA), Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS), and preferential dispatch of RE in the spot market, among others.

The GEA program was designed to continuously trigger the increase RE capacity in the country. The first round of GEA was conducted in June last year. It generated almost 2,000megawatts (MW) of capacities that were committed to deliver energy from 2023 to 2025 at a competitive price lower than or equal to the GEA prices.

For GEA2, the DOE has pre-qualified 118 bidders. The auction was supposed to be held last June 19 but the DOE rescheduled this “to give bidders more time to deliberate.”

“The most recent among them is the GEA, which is scheduled to be held for this year, and that involves having 3,600MW for 204 and 2025, and 4,400MW by 2026. So all of these are designed towards attaining those targets.

Then you have the other policies that are in place, increasing the RPS required of distribution utilities [DUs] to source from RE from 1 percent to 2.52 percent starting this year. And then, of course, the preferential dispatch of renewable source of energy other than those that are already on must dispatch status. So we will continue to be working on those,” said Lotilla.

RPS requires DUs to source an agreed portion of their supply from eligible RE resources. It is a policy mechanism under Republic Act 9513 or the Renewable Energy Act of 2008.

Aside from the policies cited by the energy secretary, the agency will also be working on the transmission lines that are necessary in order to bring RE to the markets or where they are needed, as well as the energy storage systems that are necessary to complement the particularly the variable RE sources.

“So there’s much that needs to be done especially in the implementation,” Lotilla said.

On offshore wind (OSW), Lotilla said his office would like to see this new technology succeed.

“The offshore wind was not part of the equation when the target of achieving 50 percent by 2040 was envisioned but then we have that as an additional source and the potential is also great even if the gestation period is even beyond the life of this administration. We hope we will be able to see already the fruits of using offshore wind before the end of the President’s term,” he said.

The DOE is planning to conduct an auction for offshore wind technology next year.

“We actually consulted with the OSW service contract awardees and they said next year would be a good time for them. So we plan to hold an auction that includes OSW by next year,” said DOE Undersecretary Rowena Guevara.