The Philippines Solar and Storage Energy Alliance (PSSEA) seeks to unlock the country’s solar rooftop potential by identifying and addressing the industry’s bottlenecks.
PSSEA president Jose Rafael Mendoza said the country’s solar rooftop potential is huge as data from Manila Electric Co. (Meralco) and Visayan Electric Co. (VECO) showed “net metering has less than 0.1 percent penetration of customer count but already one percent of their peak demand.”
PSSEA recently held a roundtable discussion with industry players, the Department of Energy (DOE) and the Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) to collaborate and address the pressing concerns of the industry.
“Rooftop solar has the potential to uplift the lives of many Filipinos across all the islands in a profound way. Distributed energy will play a key role in this energy transition, creating jobs and increasing household savings to consumers,” Mendoza said.
He said PSSEA would engage various stakeholder groups in the coming months as the alliance aims to publish a baseline market report by August.
Mendoza said PSSEA was working with data science firm Thinking Machines to use artificial intelligence and satellite imagery (geospatial analysis) to count rooftop areas and use computer vision to detect how many have solar panels.
The move aims to address status of solar rooftop in the country today given that some do not register with the DOE to avail of incentives. DOE data showed that there are only 91 awarded solar rooftop service contracts with a total capacity of 75.76 MW.
“This opens up new data points in understanding the market and we will open source the results to aid both government and the private sector,” Mendoza said.
Mendoza said solar rooftop, even without RE incentives, have become economically viable in most areas and thus there is a need to maximize its potential.
He said PSSEA also aims to address concerns of distribution utilities (DUs) that some solar installations end up being customer complaints to the DU, such as over promised savings or unsafe electrical regulation.