Alternative framework for renewable energy planning in the Philippines

Like many countries striving to be responsible consumers of energy and conscious of the need to mitigate the impact of climate change, the Philippines has, in both policy and practice, shown a bias towards Renewable Energy (RE) sources. The country's proportion of RE production in primary energy and distribution in electricity is significantly higher than those of many Asian and European countries. However, the Philippine National RE Program has adopted a strategy of aggressively amassing RE capacity to the extent of tripling the capacity over the period 2011 to 2030. The preoccupation with more megawatts rather than the value of RE beyond clean energy has erected a bias against off-grid RE applications. Off-grid RE applications can displace more expensive diesel generation and can enhance the livelihood opportunities for communities. The insistence on focusing on megawatts is threatening to bloat the current Feed-in-Tariff structure by causing large, grid-connected applications to be seriously oversubscribed. This paper reviews the current RE status in the Philippines and presents a simple alternative planning paradigm in which the ability of RE technology to affect the livelihood of the residents and the effectiveness of its energy delivery are used to distinguish the utility of different RE technologies in off-grid and grid-connected areas. The authors also describe an actual kW scale, off-grid application that addresses both energy and economic poverty. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.