Gas, coal stay indispensable

Despite the country’s pursuit of cleaner energy sources, the shaky power situation evidenced by the successive declaration of power alerts shows that coal and gas remain indispensable for stabilizing the grid.

Even ACEN Corp., an Ayalabacked energy company that has been aggressively pouring in massive capital investments to develop renewable energy, acknowledges that conventional fuels remain essential to keep the lights on.

ACEN president and CEO Eric Francia said in an interview on Wednesday the country needs more gas supply to act as a transition fuel before fully integrating clean energy into the national grid.

“The alerts are not expected, it is an El Niño year, and there is limited output from hydro from normal times. We have also been getting high temperatures that have an impact on demand. We are not out of the woods, we need more capacity,” Francia said.

“The way forward is we need more gas as the transition fuel. In the meantime, because it will take time to augment the gas capacity, we need as an interim solution the diesel plants to operate because the gas is not yet there.”

“We always struggle with summer demand, the peak output for solar plants, that is a big help but they cannot help alone, we need conventional plants,” he added.

According to Francia, solely implementing renewable energy sources, despite their massive potential, is insufficient to address the current energy challenge.

A robust energy storage system, he said, is also needed to complement renewable sources to ensure a reliable and sustainable energy solution.

“Given that there is a supply gap, we need to augment the system supply in the energy and reserve market. Traditional battery storage is like a 4- to 6-hour battery that is quite ideally paired with solar farms where we produce during the day and store it at night. It is still expensive today, but not crazily expensive,” Francia explained.

On Wednesday, the Luzon grid breached its peak demand as consumers required more supply to cool off amid the sweltering weather.

Data provided by the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines, the country’s lone transmission operator, showed that the demand in Luzon clocked in at 14,016 megawatts at 2:54 yesterday afternoon — exceeding its projected peak of 13,917 MW by 99 MW.