The Department of Energy (DOE) is planning to re-calibrate the country’s power mix by opting to retire coal-fired power facilities at the scale of 5,000 megawatts in the medium term.

According to Michael Sinocruz, director of the DOE’s Energy Policy and Planning Bureau, that has been one of the key scenarios considered in the updating of the Philippine Energy Plan (PEP) or the blueprint that will guide energy investments in the country.

“Definitely, we’ve already considered the retirement of coal. There will be retirement of coal capacities of around 4,000 to 5,000MW,” he stressed.

He expounded that the criteria for retirement would factor in facets, such as: the plants have already reached their technical life; and these coal-fired power plants are considered inefficient, in terms of the number of outages.

“So these are the criteria that we used for us to decide whether these coal power plants shall be retired under the clean energy scenario,” Sinocruz noted.

The energy official has not specified the exact timeframe though on when those coal-fired generating facilities would completely vanish from country’s generation mix.

Sinocruz stated that the plan of the government, in collaboration with the industry players, is to tap into the opportunities dangled by the energy transition mechanism (ETM) and the Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP) when it comes to the funding that can be availed of so the coal plants can be scheduled for retirements earlier than their conventional operating life cycle.

The ETM, in particular, can be accessed as a concessional or commercial funding that has to be channeled into accelerating the exit of coal and other fossil fuel-based generating facilities in the energy mix and replace them with cleaner alternatives, primarily renewable energy.

The DOE official, nevertheless, stated that it might not be a complete phaseout that will happen for the coal-fired power fleets of the country; instead some of these facilities may be aligned for repurposing similar to what other energy markets have also been pursuing.  

“The ETM will come up with an investment plan for the retirement or repurposing of coal,” he pointed out, adding that the Philippines is not alone when it comes to the campaign of not fully scrapping coal from its mix, but will instead embrace innovation when it comes to reducing their carbon emissions.

“It is not only the Philippines that is considering the repurposing of coal – even those countries that have RE technologies are also looking at the repurposing of coal,” he emphasized.

In fact, the DOE and several players in the industry are already exploring plans on ammonia co-firing for the coal plants; or they might even pivot to carbon capture and storage (CCS) as another technological innovation that could pare the emissions of these thermal assets.

Apart from coal, another unsettling concern recurrently raised with the DOE is its proclivity on additional investments for gas-fired power facilities; with the agency asserting that these are being aligned as flexible capacities that could help ease the intermittency impact of renewables in power grids.

Sinocruz opined “if the system will dictate that we will not need gas anymore to support the entry of intermittent RE, it will die a natural death,” with him noting that “it’s not only the Philippines that has been considering gas as a transition fuel,” but even the more advanced countries in Asia like Japan, South Korea and even China.