News Clipping

French multinational electric utility firm Engie will scale up its solar installations in the Philippines, with a grander aim of becoming one of the major players of this flourishing sector in the country.

“We are basically looking to expand our RE (renewable energy) portfolio asset with our partners as investors,” Bert Deprest, head of Renewable Energy Solutions of Engie Southeast Asia, has indicated.

The French company is in a tie-up with the FDC Utilities, Inc. of the Filinvest Group of the Gotianuns on the massive scale solar installations in the country. FDCUI holds 60 percent equity in their joint venture (JV) firm; while Engie has 40 percent stake – the level of allowable shareholdings that foreign firms could have in RE investments in the Philippines.

The Engie-Filinvest joint venture company currently has 6.0-megawatt capacity in their solar portfolio – and the kick-off point had been mostly on rooftop solar installations.

The next target, according to Deprest, will be on utility-scale solar deployments in targeted sites across Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao grids – although he has not disclosed yet the extent of what they have been mapping up on blueprint.

“We’re actively looking for utility scale, we also have a wide pipeline on that,” Deprest said, qualifying that “I cannot give a figure yet to that but we all have different projects that we’re currently investigating for development,” he said.

On continued solar rooftop installations, Deprest noted that the JV firm is “in the process of pre-commercial developments,” and the prospective projects are for “commercial and industrial customers in the three regions.” He expounded that “Engie is actually active in Luzon through our district cooling operations; then we basically have facility management operation in the Cebu area; and then our partner Filinvest is in Mindanao.”

The solar investment space is seen to be in a tougher arena of competition moving forward with the Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) kicking in to implementation phase next year.

The enticement for RE investors to come to the Philippines could also be complemented by other policies that are due for enforcement, such as the net metering system and the Green Energy Option Program (GEOP) that will then bestow the “power of choice” for Filipino consumers to patronize green energy sources in securing their electricity service.

Engie is one of the world’s biggest players in the energy sector – and its experience and track record in the RE space would be highly beneficial to its partner on targeted investments rollout in the Philippines.

Power generation capacity in the Philippines based on renewable sources other than hydro is expected to see a double-digit annual growth over the next 12 years, driven by the continued growth in the economy and the population.

In a market outlook report focused on the Philippines, analytics firm GlobalData said installed capacity was cued for an 11.2-percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2019 to 2030.

The London-based firm said investments in renewables were being driven by rising electricity consumption, which is expected at 6.5 percent CAGR to reach 173,000 gigawatt-hours in 2030 from 81,7000 gWh in 2018.

“Growing population is driving electricity consumption in the Philippines,” said Harshavardhan Reddy Nagatham, power industry analyst at GlobalData. “As a result, new investment in capacity addition is urgently needed.”

Nagatham in a statement observed that peak demand in the Philippines has been increasing yearly and a lot of new capacity was expected, especially in renewables.

According to National Grid Corporation of the Philippines, peak demand in Luzon alone reached a new high of 11,245 megawatts last May 15.

Nagatham said investments were being given a boost by the government’s drive to reduce its dependence on imported fossil fuel as well as to promote the development of renewable power capacity, particularly solar through the net metering scheme.

Net metering gives incentive to owners of rooftop solar installations with credit for power generated in excess of what they need, which is then delivered to the grid and which they can use to offset future electricity consumption.

“Net metering currently has low adoption in the Philippines, but can play a major role in increasing renewable power capacity in the country and in helping with the supply security,” Nagatham said.

“Creating awareness among the public and businesses to embrace the technology and encouraging the adoption of solar and other renewable power technologies among institutional power consumers will go a long way in achieving the country’s energy independence and security,” he added.

GlobalData estimated that the share of solar and onshore wind power in the country’s power-generation mix would increase to 13 percent and 4.6 percent of total installed capacity in 2030, respectively, from 4.3 percent and 1.8 percent in 2018.

Over the same period, the share of coal in the power mix is expected to decrease to 32.5 percent from 36.4 percent.

MUNICH, Germany – With the “green-leaning” transformative phase happening in the energy sector globally, hydrogen storage is being dangled as the “next major innovation” that can further advance the sustainability of renewable energy (RE) deployments.

For countries wanting to increase RE installations to keep pace with the world’s climate agenda or to comply with policies such as the Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) due for implementation next year in the Philippines, industrial giant Siemens AG is advancing “green hydrogen” storage to sort out the intermittency dilemmas of RE technologies, primarily wind and solar.

Siemens and other European firm-partners Verbund and Voestalpine have successfully deployed their pilot “green hydrogen storage” in Linz, Austria and have brought this facility to commercial fruition spring this year.

The next step for the industrial giant will be to scale it for the RE storage – primarily for wind energy in Germany; before dangling it for massive installations as complement to RE solutions for the world.

Through the use of proton exchange membrane (PEM) electrolyzer or what is referred to as “water electrolysis technology”, renewable energy sources can be turned into hydrogen and they can be re-used as electricity as needed in an electricity system.

Green hydrogen storage technology is seen ideal to marry with power markets intending mammoth RE deployments and also to reinforce reliability in power grids. For the Philippines, in particular, it has cast long-term RE investments to be underpinned by the government-enforced RPS or the mandate for distribution utilities (DUs) to secure prescribed percentage of their power supply from RE sources.

The need for energy storage as a coupling to the on-and-off generation of RE sources on a massive scale has been under experiment for several years, but the “cost piece of the puzzle” or the commerciality aspect and the completeness of solution of proposed technologies have yet to concretize their way into markets.

Philippine companies like First Gen Corporation, Aboitiz Power and AC Energy Inc. are all studying the prospects of battery storage as a technology coupling to intermittent renewables like wind and solar. And similar to all other players globally, they are also monitoring anticipated exponential decline in the cost of energy storage – looking at cost competitiveness trajectory in the next five years.

As noted by Wolfgang Hesoun, chairman of the managing board of Siemens AG Osterreich, the company “has developed what currently is the world’s largest PEM electrolyzer module”, whicb could then able to produce 1,200 meters of ‘green hydrogen’ an hour.

The German firm has projected that “the global demand for hydrogen will increase ten-fold by year 2050 – or seen reaching 6 .0trillion cubic meters by that time. Several hydrogen “green storage” demonstration projects are now underway in Europe and the United States; and the technology is also seen coming its way next into Asian energy markets.

“This technology supports our customers as they drive transformation with the energy sector and enhance climate protection,” Siemens Chief Technology Officer Roland Busch said.

Siemens further noted that “green hydrogen is the perfect example of the sector coupling which is urgently required for decarbonizing power generation – and similarly applicable to industries and the transport sector.