The Philippines will need an addition 7, 200 megawatts (MW) of power in order to support the country’s growing economy until 2030, Energy Undersecretary Mylene Capongcol said yesterday.
The Luzon grid will need an additional 5, 000 MW while Visayas will need 1, 300 MW and Mindanao with 900 MW, she said during the 4th Annual Philippines Power and Electicity Week Forum.
“The new administration targets GDP growth of 6 percent to 7 percent in 2016, 6.5 percent to 7.5 percent in 2017 and 7 percent to 8 percent until 2022 with most of the spending expected to support higher infrastructure needed to deliver basic services to the people,” Capongol said.
This is based on the 140 distribution utilities’ plans for 2015-203o.
Capangcol added that 53% of the country’s energy requirement was supplied by indigenous energy while 47% came from imported oil used for transport, and coal for generating electricity.
She also said that DOE will continue conducting Philippine Energy Contracting Rounds, targeting 18 service contracts until 2030.
“In terms of indigenous coal, we are monitoring 48 exploration service contracts for declaration of additional coal reserves in commercial quantity [mineable] to enable the conversion of these service contracts to development/production contracts. With this, we estimated the in-situ coal reserves to reach 4,297.7 MMMT by 2030.”
She added that 44% of the country’s electricity production as of March 2016 came from coal, while 22% came from natural gas and 25% from renewable energy.
“While we saw significant growth in the use of variable renewable energy due to the different incentives provided by the Renewable Energy Act, the supply of electricity from hydro had been adversely affected by the El Niño phenomenon registering a 1-percent decline over the past five years,” she said.