Energy Secretary Raphael Lotilla said Thursday the Philippines still has a potential geothermal capacity of 365 megawatts as identified under the Competitive Renewable Energy Zones.
“We must scale up our renewable energy development, including exploration and development of geothermal energy resources. The Competitive Renewable Energy Zones was launched to help achieve the country’s goals of scaling up renewable energy generation on the power system,” Lotilla said during the 3rd Philippine International Geothermal Conference.
The CREZ process identifies the most economic RE resource areas so that transmission planning and expansion can accelerate their development.
“CREZ initially identified 25 high-quality solar and wind resources across the Philippines with an estimated total capacity of 152,097 MW, including the potential capacity coming from geothermal resources at 365 MW,” the energy chief said.
The DOE is also working on a “Geothermal Derisking Roadmap for the Philippines” with assistance from the Asian Development Bank.
The roadmap aims to identify, evaluate and recommend geothermal pre-development stage de-risking strategies to assist the agency in assessing and prioritizing policies and regulations that can increase geothermal development in the Philippines.
“In other countries, various schemes for resource risk mitigation have made significant contributions to the development of their geothermal resources,” Lotilla said.
“While we aspire that Geothermal Derisking Roadmap for the Philippines project would result in new geothermal capacity development within the next five years, this project will require all our collective efforts today, as a country, as we have unique circumstances compared to those countries with existing geothermal risk mitigation facilities,” he said.
Lotilla said the DOE envisioned adding more geothermal capacity in the succeeding years. It expects additional capacities from two binary power plants—the 29-MW Palayan Binary Power Plant in Manito, Albay and the 17-MW Tiwi Binary Geothermal Project in Tiwi, Albay next year.
The 20-MW capacity from the Tonawon Geothermal Project in Sorsogon province is in the pipeline.
“All these would significantly contribute to our renewable energy targets in the power generation mix to achieve 35 percent by 2030 and 50 percent by 2040. To date, we are now at 22 percent,” Lotilla said.