By
Lenie Lectura - August 22, 2019
THE National Renewable
Energy Board (NREB) will recommend to the Department of Energy (DOE) the
extension of the deadline and expanded allocation target for run-of-river and
biomass projects.
At present, developers
of run-of-river and biomass power generation plants have until end-2019 to
finish their projects to qualify for the feed-in-tariff (FiT) that guarantees
payment for their capacity output for 20 years.
The DOE has set an
installation target capacity of 250 megawatts (MW) for run-of-river and
biomass, respectively.
Atty. Monalisa
Dimalanta, chairman of NREB, said the allotted capacity for biomass has been
filled up while only less than 100 MW out of the 250 MW capacity for
run-of-river has been filled up.
“For NREB, we will
request. We’ll formalize our request to the secretary to accommodate all the
capacity that will be tested for FiT eligibility.
“For run-of-river,
there’s no excess capacity. It will be filled up but they won’t be able to meet
it within the year. It’s just that they can’t do the testing this year. For
biomass, they will meet it within the year but it’s excess capacity,” said
Dimalanta.
She concluded: “So, the
request we’ll make to the [energy] secretary is to accommodate both the
extension on timeline for run-of-river hydro and the excess capacity within the
timeline for biomass.”
NREB is the advisory
body tasked by law to recommend policies, rules and standards to govern the
implementation of the renewable-energy (RE) law, which granted fiscal and
nonfiscal incentives to RE projects.
For run-of-river
projects, NREB will propose to extend the deadline to second quarter of next
year from end-December this year. “I need to check the timeline but definitely
by next year, second quarter,” she said, adding that for biomass there’s “no
more deadline but [we] accommodate them because they already have their
certificate of confirmation of commerciality.”
She said it is up to
the DOE to decide. “We don’t know if the secretary will agree but that’s going
to be our request to him that we accommodate both. I think the
secretary is open to accepting the hydro one. It’s the 100 MW excess in biomass
that we are still trying to convince [him about] because that one has the
impact on FiT-All.”
The Energy Regulatory
Commission (ERC) approved a FiT rate of P5.90 per kWh for run-of-river hydro
covering an installation target of 250 MW in 2012. The regulator then reduced
the run-of-river hydro FiT to P5.8705 per kWh for projects completed in January
to December 2017 after reviewing and implementing the 0.5 percent digression
rate.
The ERC also approved a
FiT rate of P6.63 per kWh for biomass in 2012 but reduced it to P6.5969 per kWh
in 2017 to reflect the digressed rate for projects completed within the year.
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