Energy security is an essential part of development. There is no doubt that we need reliable energy not just to keep businesses going but to inject progress in other sectors too—health, agriculture, transport; name it and it needs dependable electricity. When we think of the future of energy, therefore, we must consider how energy can best be used to drive other sectors which collectively contribute to the country’s development. There is also the need to prioritize access to energy in the future. There are challenges however in making this happen and reforms have to be introduced at the policy and governance levels.
One of our major findings in our policy brief “Striking a Balance: Coal-Fired Power Plants: in the Philippines’ Energy Future,” points to the disconnect between the country’s aspiration of sustainable development and energy security. The Electric Power Industry Reform Act of 2001 mandates the government to “ensure and accelerate” the total electrification of the country, provide adequate and continuous supply of energy, ensure socially and environmentally sound energy sources and promote the utilization of indigenous, new and renewable energy sources to lessen dependence on energy. Among these, however, the implementation of the policy seems to lean heavily toward merely considering affordability, an insight that was validated by an industry player at the launch of our policy brief last year. The government has been expected to go for the least cost-technology —which in the most facile sense, appears to be coal —because of mere affordability, but this is a shortsighted and unbalanced criterion or standard. The identification of health, environmental and social impact as externalities and not as inherent considerations for choosing our energy source decouples energy security from genuine development.
How could this be changed? One way is to tighten interagency cooperation in the aspect of decision-making. The Department of Energy is the prime government actor in this arena, but it must broaden the space and scope for exhaustive consultations with other government agencies such as the National Economic and Development Authority, Department of Environment and Natural Resources and Department of Health. In our policy brief, we pointed out that “input from Neda only comes in when government funds and exposure are involved.” Furthermore, “private ventures solely fall under the jurisdiction of the DoE with very minimal to no intra-government involvement towards approval, with the exception of DENR.”
Communities and civil society groups must also be included and considered in assessing options for sourcing energy. Theirs is the voice that often gets drowned out in the process of approving permits for CFPP operations, as we have found out in the focus group discussions we conducted. They have concerns that are legitimate and critical, not to mention the fact that host communities are the ones that directly bear the social and environmental effects of utilizing CFPPs.
Without comprehensive inputs from other government agencies and stakeholders, we will continue to have a limited understanding of the overall effects of CFPPs. This makes it easy—but also costly, at the same time—for government to veer towards the CFPP technology in meeting the country’s energy needs, exposing a huge loophole in the implementation of the Epira law as it is skewed towards the low-cost option. What exacerbates this is the weak implementation of the 2008 Renewable Energy Act and the paucity of similar policies that support, promote and incentivize investments for other sources of energy.
The government must then reform its energy policy to make it more cognizant of the bigger picture, responsive to the long-term needs of the citizenry and appropriate for the context of sustainable development. Only then can we walk the talk, in the sense that we will see to it that our local policies and actions are compatible with the commitments we make on a global level. We advocated a paradigm change when we pushed for the adoption of the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals, both of which called for battling climate change by supporting cleaner sources of energy; we must be consistent, as only by being consistent can then we be truly credible.
We further recommend that the following steps be taken: review the Philippine Energy Planning process, identify an optimal energy mix for the Philippines in setting the baseload, study the viability of energy technologies, including renewable energy, against updated growth scenarios of the country, conduct a full cost accounting of energy technology options and determine the competitiveness of energy technology options. This will guide us in doing away with the disconnect between our goal to attain sustainable development and also achieving energy security.
The government needs only to be firm and aggressive in doing these in order to send the right signal to the private sector. While CFPPs have a role to play in filling our energy needs in the short-term, we could not and must not rely on them in the coming decades. The rest of the world is making a transition towards cleaner energy and we must do the same. The price of getting left behind is steep.
The future is not with coal. It is with renewables. The future is not tomorrow. It is already here today.
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