The Department of Energy (DOE) is keenly seeking the assistance of the World Bank and other development-partners on sorting out policies as well as funding mechanisms that can bring down Philippine electricity rates as the country advances into its energy transition agenda leaning mainly on renewables.

In an exclusive interview, Energy Secretary Raphael P. M. Lotilla said “the challenge I pose to our development partners - World Bank in particular, is: in our transition path that they’ve been working with us – we have to arrive at a reduction of prices from the current ones by a certain level.”

The energy chief stressed “price is a significant concern for our people,” hence, that warranted the differentiation of scenarios being drawn up by the department in its updating of the Philippine Energy Plan.

“There are various scenarios in the Philippine Energy Plan; and that’s because one cannot exactly predict technologies will become mature in the soonest time; and yet we should be able to address our energy trilemma – and that means we really have to make the rates affordable,” Lotilla highlighted.

For a country that has majority of its ratepayers on penny-pinching state when it comes to their monthly household budgets, soaring electric bills would often be their howls of protest.

Owing to that then, Lotilla is aiming for a solution to that consumer predicament that must go along with the country’s journey on to its targeted massive shift to renewables from 2030 up to the mid-century timeframe.

“That’s the challenge I’m posing – we have to do all of those clean technologies, but in that transition, how do we get now to a point where we’re going to benefit our people – not only in terms of greenhouse gas reduction, in terms of security of supply which is indigenous but the price,” the energy secretary asserted.

Lotilla emphasized that the ‘rate reduction goal’ has to be achieved in parallel with the country’s transformative re-positioning to green energy solutions.

“So they (development partners) have to work that out – that’s the kind of transition path that I want to see,” he stated.

It is worth noting that the country’s investment blitz on offshore wind installations, in particular, had been anchored on a study that the World Bank had undertaken in collaboration with the Philippine government, through the energy department.

Lotilla qualified that the clear message he has been putting across, not just with development-partners like the World Bank but also with investors is that: “we should set this rate reduction target – we want this particular target – and how to reach that, you’ve got to work with us in reaching that.”

There are available ‘energy transition financing’ being dangled to RE investments across markets that are in their transition pathways, but such mode of capital infusion has yet to get its way into the Philippine energy sector by a massive scale.

Beyond targets to take the edge off on electricity rates, Lotilla is also engaging the commitment of foreign development-partners in accelerating the electrification of many off-grid and far-flung areas of the country.

“All of these have to come together – and therefore, we’re looking at funding for our electrification target, which the President had set at a high level,” he noted.