German RE Study Mission Slated

Philippine Delegation

By MYRNA M. VELASCO

October 6, 2012, 4:12pm

With the support of the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology, a 27-man Philippine delegation will be invited to Germany to study the landscape of one of the major European domains which embraced the renewable energy solution.

According to Volker Steigerwald, GIZ program manager, the Philippine delegation will comprise of representatives from the government and private sector players of the power industry.

He mentioned that executives of the Manila Electric Company (Meralco) will be joining the group and will be looking at Germany’s experience on net metering for solar technology.

On the part of the government, it will be a contingent coming from the ranks of the regulatory bodies such as the Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) and Department of Energy; as well as from the legislative branch.

 “The delegation from the Philippine government will have a separate schedule with that of the private sector,” Steigerwald said.

He stressed that the private sector will meet with their counterpart players in Europe and it is hoped that they will share know-how and experiences on both countries’ plunge into renewable energy developments.

Net metering will be one of the policy areas where the Filipino investors would want to be acquainted of, especially on the technical aspect of interconnecting distributed generation facilities to the network of the distribution utilities.

The Philippine power industry stakeholders are similarly expecting to learn some lessons from Germany’s path to RE, including the impact of the sudden reduction on the feed-in-tariffs (FITs) as support mechanism for investments in the sector.

Primarily for solar, the drastic drop in the cost of the technology had somehow triggered changes in the incentive mechanism for RE developments in the European jurisdiction and elsewhere.

For the government, policy-making and rule-crafting will be the vital aspects that they can share experiences with or learn from their German counterparts.   source