AUCTION FOR 2,000-MW RE TARGETED THIS YEAR
THE Department of Energy (DoE) is targeting to commence this year the auction of some 2,000 megawatts (MW) of renewable energy (RE) capacity.
At the sidelines of a Senate hearing on Tuesday, National Renewable Energy Board (NREB) board chairman Monalisa Dimalanta told reporters that all RE developers will be invited to participate in the bidding.
“The target is to roll this out within the year. That’s what the (Energy) Secretary (Alfonso Cusi) wants. Hopefully we meet the target,” she said.
“Based on the instructions of the secretary, the main objective is promote more investments in the RE sector considering that it won’t have feed-in tariffs and another round of feed-in tariffs anymore so it’s really to attract more investments and the idea is to create a market for them, to access the market for renewable energy,” she said.
Dimalanta said the NREB was tasked by the DoE to identify whether the energy sources will come from solar, hydro, or geothermal.
“(But) the way we are looking at it in NREB … we won’t specify the resource but we will look at whether this is baseload capacity, mid-merit, or peaking,” she said.
Dimalanta said a price cap will be set during the bidding, under which RE developers can offer their capacity, before allocating it to the distribution utilities which are required to purchase RE.
In the Philippines, the annual renewable portfolio standard or RPS requirement should increase by 1 percent annually, to be reviewed and adjusted by the DoE.
The 2,000-MW renewable energy was the DoE’s new 10-year target in a bid to provide the country of an ample power supply by 2040.