At A Glance
- The solar facilities that will be reaching full commercial operations between now and the next quarter will be very beneficial addition to the country's electricity supply during the summer months – primarily in plugging capacity gap that will be voided because of the extreme de-rating to be suffered by the hydro plants with the incursion of El Niño phenomenon.
Power supply in the country will be shored up by 3,309 megawatts this year from new generating facilities; plus 334 megawatts that shall be drawn from battery energy storage systems (BESS), according to the Department of Energy.
As culled from the department’s data, bulk of the capacity additions for Luzon grid will be coming from renewable energy (RE) technologies that shall be dominated by solar farm projects at 1,123.95MW; then wind at 160MW; and the balance will be from hydropower at 44.32MW, geothermal at 38.57MW and biomass at 11.28MW.
Across thermal technologies, the capacity escalation logged by the DOE will be from gas at 1,320MW; and there would also be 600MW capacity beefing up from coal as well as 11.04MW from oil-fired generation.
In particular, the solar capacities set for deliveries to augment supply during the summer months would be those from the 86.2MW Subic solar power facility which is targeted on-line this February; the 82.488MW Lal-lo solar facility by April; and the 75MW Cayanga-Bugallon solar farm by May.
Industry sources noted the solar facilities that will be reaching full commercial operations between now and the next quarter will be very beneficial addition to the country’s electricity supply during the summer months – primarily in plugging capacity gap that will be voided because of the extreme de-rating to be suffered by the hydro plants with the incursion of El Niño phenomenon.
Toward the end of the year, more solar capacities are expected to be on commercial stream because that is the delivery date for the first batch of the awarded long-term power supply contracts in the first green energy auction (GEA) program that was administered by the DOE in 2022.
For wind, the additional supply will be from the initial phase of the 445.15MW Balaoi and Caunayan wind farm installation that will be on commercial stream by June this year.
The geothermal capacity increase, on the other, will be from the Tiwi and Palayan binary plants that are coming online by March; while the biomass capacity will be from a development in Isabela province.
The capacity reinforcement for coal will be drawn from the four (4) electric generating units of the Mariveles coal plant project in Bataan – and the per-unit commercial operations of the facilities at 150MW each will be spread through February, March, June and August.
Further, the major capacity buildup of more than 1,300MW by December will be coming from the Excellent Energy Resources Inc. (EERI) greenfield gas plant of the San Miguel group that is sited in Batangas province.