The Philippines’ DOE plans to award 10 additional geothermal contracts

Alexander Richter 6 Feb 2010

In news from the Philippines, the country’s “Department of Energy (DoE) is eyeing to award 10 more geothermal contracts under the Philippine Energy Contracting Round (PECR), including those under the so-called “frontier” or undeveloped areas.

“We will have to complete our geothermal bid round. There are about 10 more contracts to be awarded,” Energy assistant secretary Mario Marasigan said.

He noted the department is scheduling the auction within the quarter, but the award of contracts will depend on the pace of the review of the submitted work programs.

“We cannot commit on when we will award new contracts, it depends on how many we can complete,” he pointed out.
Of the geothermal contracts due for award, he indicated that some are for conversion to re-align incentives with the Renewable Energy Act and the rest are for fresh pre-development works.

Apart from geothermal, the energy official indicated that “there are still plenty of investors interested in RE but some of them are waiting for the final pronouncements on (some policies) – feed-in-tariff is one, the RPS (renewable portfolio standard) and net metering.”

While the government has been cornering multitude of interests for RE projects, these are still at pre-development stages, hence, any capacity addition from them will not be coming on stream until the next three to five years.

The policy set forth by DoE for geothermal “frontier areas” would be to allow investors to submit “unsolicited proposals.”

Generally, these undiscovered sites have very limited information yet as to their potential yield, so the intent is to drum up interest for these largely-untapped prospects.

For the other sites, the department said it shall evaluate which one falls under the category of “biddable areas” – to classify those that can be included in the contracting round.”

Source: Manila Bulletin