Department of Energy taps US agencies for renewable energy site mapping

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.