Camarines Sur 2nd district Rep. LRay Villafuerte (Rep. Villafuerte's office)

Camarines Sur 2nd district Rep. LRay Villafuerte has highlighted the potential benefits that the province's 7,668-megawatts (MW) offshore wind (OSW) projects will provide to the country. 

“The 16 offshore wind power projects in CamSur, once up and running, will become prime contributors of VRE power in the Philippines, in support of the Marcos administration’s decarbonization goal of significantly increasing the share of indigenous sources like wind and solar in our country’s energy mix," Villafuerte said. 

VRE stands for variable renewable energy. 

“This pioneering wind farm to be built by Danish infrastructure investment firm Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (CIP) on San Miguel Bay, along with 15 more offshore wind projects (OSW), will help the Marcos administration accelerate its planned transition from fossil fuel to renewables for the radical reduction of  the Philippines’ carbon footprint,” said the veteran solon. 

“Once the CIP-funded clean energy project costing a whopping P162.9 billion is built on San Miguel Bay in CamSur, hopefully by 2028, it will become the  first and single biggest OSW farm in the Philippines,” Villafuerte added.

Offshore wind farms use turbines that are built in the water to generate power from winds blowing across the sea. These are considered more efficient in producing energy for electricity because of the higher speed of winds in the ocean, he said.

He said that onshore wind farms, on the other hand, make use of turbines built on land to generate wind energy. 

However, both offshore and onshore facilities using wind for generating energy, along with other VRE sources like solar power, are essential to the global switch from dirty, non-renewable  fossil fuel to a zero-carbon electricity system, said Villafuerte, who had served as three-term governor before his election to the House of Representatives. 

Aside from helping the Department of Energy (DOE) meet the government’s long-term target of generating 35 percent of the domestic electricity requirements from renewables by 2030 and an even higher 50 percent by 2040, the wind farms will further stimulate economic activity and tourism in the province and create several thousand jobs, he said.

“These green or clean energy projects will likewise boost CamSur’s tourism business as these would-be wind farms are expected to attract tourists to the green project sites,” noted Villafuerte.