The Department of Energy (DOE) plans to auction 12,599 megawatts of renewable energy (RE) capacity under the Green Energy Auction Program 3 and 4 this year.
DOE Undersecretary Rowena Guevara said this would be an exciting year for renewable energy as GEAP 3 would include pumped-storage hydro and impounding hydro projects.
The GEA-3 will include non-feed-in-tariff eligible RE technologies—699 MW from impounding hydro; 3,120 MW from pumped-storage hydro; and 380 MW from geothermal.
The target delivery will be from 2028 to 2030 for both impounding hydro and pumped-storage hydro and 2024 to 2030 for geothermal.
Meanwhile, Guevara said the GEAP 4 would involve RE plus energy storage systems.
“Originally, we’re thinking of 8,200 MW for GEA 4, but it might go up,” she said.
She said GEAP 5 is expected to happen by middle of 2025, with focus on offshore wind power projects.
The DOE expects renewables to overtake coal in the power generation mix by 2028, with the entry of the large offshore wind projects.
Guevara said, however, that some coal-fired power plants with a capacity of 1,300 megawatts would still come in because they were filed before the government issued the moratorium on coal-fired facilities.
“We have incoming coal like Masinloc and Mariveles, but they are exempt from the moratorium because they were proposed before the moratorium. We cannot stop those developments that were approved before the moratorium,” Guevara said.
“Renewables will start to overtake [coal] by 2028…We will also start our offshore wind, so it will wipe out coal by then,” she said.
Coal accounts for around 60 percent of the Philippines power generation mix, while renewables represent 22 percent.
The DOE wants renewable energy’s share to increase to 35 percent in the power generation mix by 2030 and 50 percent by 2040.
The DOE said the Philippines’ power generation mix could not be directly compared to large economies like China and Indonesia because of significant differences in demographic, economic and energy profiles.
Based on Global Energy Monitor Report, China had an installed coal power plant capacity of 1,136.7 GW as of January 2024, while Indonesia had 51.6 GW. The Philippines has only 12.1 GW.
The DOE said this underscored the vast difference in the scale of energy economic infrastructures among the three countries.
It said disparity is evident in the gross generation mix from coal power plants. China generated 5,417, 848 gigawatt-hours from coal, while Indonesia generated 189,683 GWh. The Philippines only had 65,052 GWh in 2021.
