‘Green energy’ for Palawan’s Green Island can be replicated in other remote barangays

Business Mirror
13 Jul 2014 Written by Jonathan L. Mayuga

A RENEWABLE-ENERGY firm has introduced “green energy” using a portable power generator that uses biomass to a remote island in Palawan.

The firm, Solutions Using Renewable Energy (SURE), has installed its portable 20-kilowatt Biomass Gasifier Generator Set called “Power Pallet” to bring life to the sleepy villages in Green Island, Palawan. The company is working together with The United States Agency for International Development, Palawan Council for Appropriate Rural Technology and the local government of Roxas, Palawan, to energize Green Island and bring life to the sleepy villages particularly the town of Roxas, Palawan. The power generator can generate electricity using dry coconut shells, which are abundantly scattered in the island. Green Island relies on electricity supply coming from the operation of two costly purok-owned 10-kilovolt ampere diesel-fueled generator sets.

The electricity supply, however, is good only for four hours and gives around 300 families electricity supply for four hours—from 6 to 10 p.m., leaving behind more than 100 families without electricity.

The remaining 100 families now enjoy adequate supply of electricity up to 15 hours a day, through the company’s Renewable Energy Hybrid Microgrid System that includes the Power Pallet which runs on biomass. For a runtime of one hour, the Power Pallet consumes 18 kilograms of biomass weight to have a power output of 15 kilowatt- hours. Aside from giving access to substantial energy for necessary appliances of some 200 people, the Power Pallet also runs the island village’s ice-flakes maker that is essential to the resident’s main livelihood and its brackish-water desalination system that supplies 800 liters of potable water per day.

The island used to be dependent on the main city of Roxas, Palawan, to buy drinking water and ice, requiring around 1 ton every day to preserve and store, including transport, their fish.

Also, the people in the island now use the heat produced by the Power Pallet for drying seaweeds, which only takes five hours compared to their traditional practice of sun drying which takes two days.

The company SURE, through its Vice President for Operations Claire Lee, said the Power Pallet is ideal for remote islands and upland barangays or hard-to-reach areas that are far from the power grid. source