The renewable energy arm of the Philippine National Oil Co. (PNOC) is facing abolition as the renewable energy sector is flourishing without its intervention, a senator said.

Senator Sherwin Gatchalian said that he is seeing the possibility of recommending the closure of the PNOC-Renewables Corp. as the sector is moving forward without the government in the picture.

“I think as a policy, I don’t see the rationale why PNOC-RC should continue going into the renewable. I see it as another layer of inefficiency,” he told reporters in an interview last week.

The decision was based on a series of hearings on the country’s power sector by the Senate committee headed by Gatchalian.

“I was questioning the intention of PNOC-RC to go into renewables because without them, the renewable sector is already flourishing. So why are we competing with the private sector?” Gatchalian said.

The Senator also said that the PNOC-RC has not really gotten into the missionaries ever since.

“The private sector is not going to missionary development because it’s not yet practical. So if [the] government goes in, it could mean more losses,” he said.

In 2015, the government-run PNOC-RC defended its mandate to engage in electricity generation following the Justice Department’s decision on PNOC and its subsidiaries that it could not engage in power generation.