The Department of Energy (DOE) has endorsed at least 74 new projects this year that will advance into the system impact study (SIS) phase by system operator National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP).

SIS refers to an engineering study that will comprehensively assess if additional capacities from new power plant projects could be accommodated in the grid’s load network. This will signal the warranted additional investments for further infrastructure buildup in the transmission system.

As culled from DOE data, 67 of the greenfield power installations are multiple renewable energy (RE) projects; six (6) are power facilities leaning on conventional technologies in the thermal space; and one energy storage project.

To many investors, SIS is the biggest headache that continue to impede timely completion of their projects because the process could take at least two years for them to secure.

Nevertheless, system operator NGCP recently committed to the DOE that it will streamline that process and the solutions it is trying to bring to the table include: technology clustering so it can systematize approvals; outsourcing some components of the SIS process and it will also reinforce its workforce for this critical task for project developments.

According to NGCP, the technology clustering strategy “aims to streamline the process and accelerate the evaluation of multiple projects,” and that will essentially pare the waiting time for project developers.

On the part of the government, Energy Secretary Raphael P. M. Lotilla previously sounded off to media that the overall direction they are targeting is to reduce the overall SIS approval process to 60 days, instead of the usual 18 to 24 months.

The energy chief similarly broached the idea that some components of the SIS evaluation process may be set apart for artificial intelligence (AI) applications and that could cover data as well as market trends that can already be captured for predictive analytics.

With the revolutionary shift in technology installations for the country’s future energy mix, the RE domination ensemble has been posing concerns not just on massive grid integration works, but also predicaments of highly probable imbalances in the power system due to the intermittent nature of electricity generation of tech powerhouses like solar and wind.

These intricacies in grid operations have to be coherently factored in into the SIS to ensure that future capacity additions will not trigger system upsets or collapse, that in turn, could trigger unwarranted blackouts out to torment consumers.