Danessa Rivera (The Philippine Star)
- April 13, 2018 - 12:00am
MANILA, Philippines — The Department
of Energy (DOE) has teamed up with US agencies to map out locations for
renewable energy (RE) developments to avoid overcapacity in the grid.
DOE Undersecretary Felix William
Fuentebella said the RE zoning project is being done in partnership with the
United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and National
Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).
He said the project aims to prevent
another overcapacity in a certain grid, like that of Negros Island, to happen
again.
“The goal is to identify where RE
plants should be for the grid not to be compromised,” Fuentebella said. “What
we are trying to look at is where should we place RE plants to avoid that
problem that happened in Negros.”
In 2016, the influx of solar power
plant developments in Negros Island following the race to secure feed-in tariff
(FIT) incentives created concerns on overcapacity and intermittency due to
limited transmission infrastructure in the island.
This caused constraints in the
Visayas grid and caused major power outages, especially when the Negros
submarine cable can only transmit 90 megawatts (MW) to other islands in the
grid.
At that time, data showed Negros has
a total supply of 490 MW, but demand was only at 309 MW, an excess capacity of
181 MW.
Under the RE zoning, Fuentebella
said RE developments could be auctioned for specific locations.
“If we have this RE zoning, usually
what we are auctioning out are site specific RE technologies,” he said.
In the agency’s previous auction
policy, the open and competitive selection process (OCSP) only covers bidding
for hydropower and geothermal projects.
With the RE zoning, all RE
technologies will now be part of the bidding process, Fuentebella said.
Apart from the auction, solar and
biomass projects could be awarded as an operating contract, effectively
removing the pre-development stage for faster development, the DOE official
said.
However, this could not be applied
on wind projects since the wind resource in an area needs to be studied first.
“The goal in this change in policy
of service contracting is to make it more competitive compared to the
conventional plants,” Fuentebella said.
The DOE previously studied ways to
address the overcapacity issues in the RE sector.
The agency earlier looked at setting a certain
percentage limit on a per grid segment in accordance with its generation
profile and based on the capacity of the existing transmission line.
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