BDO Capital and Investment Corp. is looking for opportunities to finance more power plants as players continue to issue warnings of possible power supply shortage during summer next year.
Eduardo Francisco, BDO Capital’s president, said during at a Department of Energy’s (DOE) investment forum last Friday, renewable energy sources such as wind, solar, geothermal and run-of-river hydro are among the greener power plants that the company can easily fund provided they have good availability factors.
But Francisco said the DOE must decide what will be the role of coal-fired power plants with the industry’s expected power supply shortage during the summer season next year.
“We’ve heard that there will really be a shortfall. I also talk to the Meralco president (Ray Espinosa) regularly and he foresees problems this coming summer because if all the businesses are opened and if the economy reopens, then we will have a shortage (of) power,” Francisco said.
“Therefore, what will what happen? Will we go back to coal? I really rely on DOE for that but I’d rather have power and use coal rather than have brownout because that will destroy the (economic) catch-up we need,” Francisco added.
Last month, Frank Thiel, managing director of Quezon Power Philippines Ltd. Co., also warned that next year’s power supply scenario during the summer months could be tight.
Thiel said that as the economy re-opens, power demand is expected to recover while no significant amount of new capacity has been added to the grid apart from the fact that most plants did not able to have their proper maintenance shutdowns due to pandemic restrictions.
Earlier this year, the DOE assured there will be no power supply deficiencies during the election week, citing that only reserves are low for the said period and will not even qualify for any alert levels.
Despite the assurance, the DOE mentioned that since there are many moving parts involved in projecting power and demand supply, scenario building and continuous updating of all stakeholders is still needed to keep the projections as accurate as possible.
