posted May 11, 2016 at 11:10 pm by Alena Mae S. Flores
Power producer First Gen Corp. asked
the government to increase the share of renewable energy in the country’s power
generation mix to 50 percent to counter the damaging effects of climate change.
First Gen chairman Federico Lopez
said the remaining 50 percent of the generation mix could be shared by other
sources including low-carbon emission power projects.
Lopez said the Philippines performed
a crucial role in the recent COP 21 climate talks in Paris, chairing the
Climate Vulnerable Forum an international partnership of countries highly
vulnerable to climate change, and the V20−the group of finance ministers
representing twenty of the most vulnerable nations in the world.
Both the CVF and the V20 provided
the much-needed emotional plea for a decarbonized world. He said although
the agreements reached in Paris were dramatic, they were still not enough.
“The world is still in dire need of
more such powerful voices to turn the tide in time to avert a global
catastrophe. Sadly, however, our credibility was built on the backs of
thousands of Filipino lives, homes and livelihoods that have already been lost
and destroyed by climate change. The power of that voice grows only if we show
the will to decarbonize our own economy. Conversely, that power dies when our
actions are not consistent with that voice,” Lopez said.
Lopez said he was sad to hear the
reasoning from the business sector and the power industry that because the
Philippines was responsible for only 0.3 percent of global carbon emissions,
“we have the right to continue building more coal-fired power plants.”
He said this thinking of putting up
more coal plants to lower power costs and create most jobs and catch up with
other industrialized countries was outdated.
“However, given what we know about
global climate today, that assertion is downright thoughtless and
unconscionable. Every ton of carbon spewed into the air reverberates onto millions
of vulnerable Filipino lives with an impact that’s disproportionate with the
rest of the world,” he said.
“Meeting the economy’s power demand
with more coal-fired plants today means locking-in those high-carbon emissions
for decades. And more time wasted changing course will only mean more lives
lost, devastated, and more of our world vanishing, never to be recaptured
again,” he said.
He said a business-as-usual scenario
“is a sure road to disaster.”
“These are extraordinary times that
call for extraordinary change and everyone must shift to thinking about the
fastest route to a decarbonized economy. It is our aim that First Gen, and its
subsidiary companies, will be among the bright navigating stars of the
Philippine energy industry, blazing a path toward a decarbonized economy. It
will not be easy and we will have to explore many roads not taken but this is
where opportunities will be created and won,” he said.
Lopez said geothermal energy was
only one among the renewable energy technologies capable of
baseload operation today.
“For RE technologies, this is the
holy grail. But assuring its place in a low-carbon world means continually
driving costs down, breaking away from complacency and constantly innovating
our way towards a more competitive future. EDC must be laser-focused on
innovation if it wants to assure a place for geothermal energy in the new
energy paradigm that’s evolving here and abroad,” he said.
First Gen has a total capacity of
3,000 megawatts of clean energy sources.
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