Once the Philippines concretizes its gigawatt-scale offshore wind farm installations, the Department of Energy (DOE) casts the country’s grand ambition of exporting renewable energy (RE) capacity to Singapore and other neighbors in the Southeast Asian region.

According to Energy Secretary Raphael P.M. Lotilla, this goal is being inspired by the plan of Australia to export its surplus RE capacity to Singapore via submarine cable; and this also became a focal point of discussion in the ‘energy diplomacy agenda’ of the ASEAN Energy Ministers.

“The things that we took up from our discussions is: the agreement on the power integration project of the Philippines – to achieve the interconnection of the continental ASEAN,” he said.

Lotilla reiterated “it seems to be an outlandish proposal to supply Singapore electricity by submarine cable from Australia, but it has actually been moving forward; and a number of countries are saying that the prospects of interconnecting the BIMP (Brunei-Indonesia-Malaysia-Philippines) countries is in fact higher now than ever,” the energy chief conveyed.

The secretary expounded “if they can think of even exporting from Australia to Singapore, that’s why the Singaporean investors are interested because we are nearer than Australia - they’re looking at this from an integrated fashion because we’re already developing it in intercontinental ASEAN, you have Laos. Cambodia, Malaysia Thailand and Singapore interconnected. So other parts of ASEAN also get to be interconnected.”

The RE development roadmap of the Philippines is targeting up to 50,000 megawatts of offshore wind farm capacity by 2050; and the first-mover projects are expected reaching commercial operations starting 2028.

And when the country already reaches its energy-secure state, Lotilla emphasized that the Philippines can opt to share its RE-generated capacity to the ASEAN neighbors via interconnected transmission networks.

“One of the things that we had discussed, for example, was connecting the Philippines – to connect Palawan with North Borneo then connecting to Singapore and this is one of the things that Singapore is actually interested in to diversify their own sources of power,” he stressed.

The energy chief qualified “that means they are looking forward to the Philippines developing its renewable resources, particularly offshore wind -- that by the time we are able to produce excess renewable energy from offshore wind, they will be interested in sourcing power from the Philippines.”

Nevertheless, Lotilla acknowledged that this will entail a long journey with many challenges along the way – not just on physical interconnection of facilities, but also on harmonization of policies and legal frameworks to get this vision turn into reality.

The preliminary step that was agreed upon by the ASEAN Ministers, he noted, is the creation of the BIMP working group “that will assess the potential of these projects.”

Lotilla stated that “from the perspective of the ASEAN, there are a number of common concerns… one of them is: any transition is going to have to entail cost – and this means additional cost not only for the developed countries, but even for developing countries like the Philippines.”

He added “the central point is that: the transition is not going to be overnight and therefore we are going to prepare for a longer period of transition…what we have agreed on is to conduct studies.  And then of course, you have to have the political support – we’re not even talking about the controversial matters, we’re talking about interconnecting.”

Lotilla further asserted “here, the emphasis is on BIMP-EAGA, it’s about the cross-border power trading and the objective is to assess the potential projects, examine the technical, regulatory, policy, legal, commercial and capacity building issues relating to cross-border multilateral power trading through interconnection.”