Accelerating renewables
If plans do not miscarry, as many as 22 power projects will add a combined 1,471 megawatts (MW) of renewable energy and storage to the national grid by the end of this month, as the government rushed their completion in urgent response to the dire need for plant capacity that does not rely on increasingly expensive fossil fuels.
Energy Secretary Sharon Garin said last week that the Department of Energy (DOE) had been working closely with private developers to accelerate their timetable so that “we have reliable, indigenous energy entering the grid immediately,” thus helping prevent rates of distributors such as Meralco and rural electric cooperatives from “spiking.”
Empowered by the declaration of a national energy emergency spurred by the Iran war, the DOE made full use of the Energy Virtual One-Stop Shop (EVOSS) system to cut through miles of bureaucratic red tape and resolve technical and administrative hurdles to move up the completion dates of these solar, hydro, biomass, and wind projects plus energy storage systems.
Another 110 projects that could add another 6,700 MW are likewise under close monitoring for accelerated deployment as part of a broader initiative to increase the share of indigenous energy and displace more expensive diesel-fired plants from the energy mix.
Desperate catch up
This is well and good which begs the question: Why did it take a crisis of the proportion of the war between the United States and Israel against Iran for the Philippine government to be goaded into swift action?
After all, there has been a perennial need for reliable, affordable, and renewable energy to wean the country away from fossil fuels including oil and the EVOSS system—a web-based filing and monitoring system aimed at improving ease of doing business in the capital-intensive sector—has been in place since 2019.
Yet, it has not been fully maximized over the past seven years and when geopolitical crises have yet to erupt. Now, the government is left to play desperate catch up to secure energy supply against the backdrop of an unprecedented oil price shock.
The underutilized EVOSS system is, unfortunately, just one of the policy gaps that have to be immediately closed to insulate the country’s power system from the worst effects of the global energy crisis.
Right-of-way issues
Undersecretary Rowena Cristina L. Guevara, who supervises the DOE’s Renewable Energy Management Bureau and Electric Power Industry Management Bureau, underscored in a commentary in the Inquirer that it was imperative that all roadblocks be removed so that the surge in additional capacity will be absorbed by the system and then distributed to the industrial, commercial, and residential users.
And this will require action of not just by the DOE, but other government agencies and local government units who can work together to, for example, immediately resolve right-of-way (ROW) issues.
These stubborn ROW challenges have long bogged down not just energy projects but other vital infrastructure projects such as roads, bridges, and transportation systems, causing budgets to bloat and projects to be inordinately delayed as consistently pointed out by multilateral lending institutions bankrolling these massive projects.
For instance, Guevara shared the example of how only 50 MW of a committed renewable energy capacity of 270 MW under the government’s Green Energy Auction Program were injected into the grid, all because the completion of two transmission towers had been stalled by a ROW dispute for two years.
Future disruptions
Board of Investments data released on Tuesday showed total green lane investments reached P6.43 trillion as of March, up 5.24 percent from P6.11 trillion at the end of 2025, of which renewable energy projects accounted for P5.52 trillion or 85.92 percent of the total green lane investments.
But making it unnecessarily difficult for investors to see their projects go into operation may cap that number, thus this heightened sense of urgency must not again wane due to complacency or when the current crisis is resolved.
Rigorous and consistent follow through must be the norm, and not the exemption so that plans will lead to concrete, beneficial actions.
“This is not a DOE problem alone. It involves local governments, landowners, transmission operators and regulators. No single agency can resolve it. But the cost of not resolving it is borne by every Filipino who opens their electricity bill,” Guevara said.
Such level of concerted action by government agencies, local government units, and crucial private sector players such as the National Grid Corp. of the Philippines to fortify the energy grid and usher in the influx of additional renewable energy capacity may be late in coming, but nevertheless should be allowed to come to full fruition.
Doing so will bring Filipinos not just immediate relief from the current crisis engulfing the Middle East and spilling over to vulnerable, oil-importing countries such as the Philippines, but more importantly, protection from future disruptions that may again put the cost and availability of power supply at great risk.
