The Department of Energy (DOE) is working with the Asian Development Bank in crafting a geothermal de-risking roadmap for the Philippines.
The DOE said the program will identify, evaluate and recommend geothermal pre-development stage de-risking strategies that will assist in assessing and prioritizing policies and regulations to increase the development of the power resource in the country.
“In other countries, various schemes for resource risk mitigation have made significant contributions to the development of their geothermal resources. While we aspire that geothermal derisking roadmap for the Philippines project would result in new geothermal capacity development within the next five years, this project will require all our collective efforts today, as a country, as we have unique circumstances compared to those countries with existing geothermal risk mitigation facilities,” said DOE Secretary Raphael Lotilla at the third Philippine International Geothermal Conference yesterday.
Lotilla said geothermal exploration is expensive and has a long gestation period of about four to six years.
He added only about 59 percent of drilled wells have sufficient resources for power generation.
The DOE said recent policies will help encourage geothermal investments among them giving qualified and registered generating units utilizing RE sources preferential dispatch in the Wholesale Electricity Spot Market.
Lotilla also said the launching of Competitive Renewable Energy Zones initially identified 25 solar and wind resources across the Philippines with an estimated total capacity of 152,097 megawatts (MW) including the potential capacity coming from geothermal resources at 365 MW. – Jed Macapagal
