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.
The government should not be involved on engineering, installation and operation of RE facilities. What is needed from the government is to come out with a consistent policy on renewable energy. When investments are carried out, a prognosis for future policies must be made. If the future is uncertain, larger risk margins should be included in the investment appraisal. Sudden, unexpected policy changes are one type of uncertainty that makes it more difficult to attract capital. I believe the senator is right that PNOC should not be involved on power generation, they should focus more on policy making i.e. long-term energy policy.