Price parity in electricity sold by households back to the grid via net-metering should be considered to encourage more investments in the renewable energy (RE) sector.
Richard Tantoco, president of Energy Development Corp. (EDC) in an online forum on Tuesday said some households in the country buy power from distributors at an average of P11 per kilowatt hour (kWh) but can only sell them back to the grid at P4 per kWh.
Net-metering is the term for the sale of excess power generated from consumer-owned renewable energy installations to the local distribution grid of electric distribution utilities that can be paid via an offset to the monthly power bill.
“In other countries… it is actually parity. If you buy at P11, then you produce (extra energy) from your solar panels, you also sell it back to the grid at P11 and policies like that are not yet present in the Philippines,” Tantoco said.
“The first thing to fix is parity and pricing. This happened in the state of Hawaii and in many European countries and we need to fix that, that pricing disparity, that pricing asymmetry to let solar (investments) take off,” Tantoco added.
In the same event, EDC said RE investments should be pushed to help combat the effects of climate change which can also be reinforced with practical steps that nations and enterprises can take.
Tantoco said forest cover rehabilitation and regeneration is also critical while families and individuals can also contribute by changing lifestyle practices towards conservation of natural resources and decreased material consumerism.
“While we can no longer undo the environmental mistakes that humanity has made in the past, it is up to all of us to do something to prevent them from happening again to be a part of the solution to the greatest crisis of our time,” Tantoco said.
EDC is the country’s biggest 100-percent RE company that accounts for over 40 percent of the Philippines’ renewable energy output and serves about 10 percent of the country’s overall electricity demand.
EDC’s installed capacity is currently at 1,500 megawatts. -J. Macapagal
