The Department of Energy (DOE) has formally issued the notice for the second green energy auction (GEA) in June this year, wherein it intends to offer 11,600 megawatts of renewable energy (RE) capacities to interested investors. The tendering process for the award of long-term power supply agreements (PSAs) to RE developers will cover 3,600 megawatts of capacity due for delivery next year; another 3,600 MW for commercial operations date (COD) in 2025; and the remaining 4,400 MW by 2026. These capacities will be sited in three major islands: 7,715 MW for the Luzon grid;  2,695 MW in the Visayas; and 1,190 MW for the Mindanao grid. In a statement to the media, the energy department stipulated that it is inviting “all qualified suppliers to participate in the second round of the green energy auction 2.” The technologies covered by the new round of RE capacity bidding will be those on ground- and roof-mounted solar; floating solar; and, onshore wind, biomass and waste-to-energy facilities. The agency apprised interested parties that the terms of reference (TOR) as well as the auction round procedures (ARP) will be issued 20 days after the issuance of the notice of auction (NOA); while the green energy auction reserve (GEAR) prices will be made known within 30 days via an official pronouncement from the Energy Regulatory Commission. The DOE said that most of the provisions in the TOR of the first round of RE auction will be adopted in the slated second bidding, including the "indivisibility rule" or the non-division of capacity once that is already committed in the GEA program of the government. “While the GEA-2 is expected to encourage more investments in power generation, it further pursues to promote the growth of RE as one of the country’s primary sources of energy by facilitating transparent and competitive selection of RE facilities to support the major goal of the government of attaining energy security through the entry of new capacities in the grid,” the department noted. The increment in annual RE installations to underpin the government-enforced Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) has been elevated by the DOE to 2.52-percent from previously at 1.0-percent. While many investors support the "energy transition agenda" being advanced by the government, many of them are still incessantly complaining of mounting cases of permitting hurdles that have been impeding project developments, including those on the integration of the massive scale RE capacities into the grid. Relative to the line-up of RE technologies included in GEA-2, the DOE indicated that it will “revisit the data and the status of various ongoing run-on-river (ROR) hydro projects to enable the determination of the auction capacities for the succeeding GEA rounds, the earliest of which is by the fourth quarter of this year.” It emphasized that the cap of 350 megawatts for such hydro installations under the feed-in-tariff incentive (FIT) system “remained unsubscribed,” and the remaining capacity to be filled in still stands at 177.217 MW as of February this year. The department specified that it is currently coordinating with the ERC for the FIT-2 and FIT-3 rates for the run-of-river hydro facilities that would still be placed under the FIT program. Typically, there is FIT degression or reduction in the tariff being enforced for each technology covered by the subsidy scheme; and that goes through fresh round of calculation by the industry regulator. The DOE justified that “while the GEA program was introduced as another market option for RE developers, the DOE finds it more efficient to facilitate the completion of ROR hydro projects under the FIT program.”