FIT-All rate for RE tech seen lower after proposed review

by Myrna Velasco, 23 March 2015
from Manila Bulletin

The National Renewable Energy Board (NREB) has indicated that the Feed-in-Tariff Allowance (FIT-All) rate being integrated into the consumers’ electricity bills will likely go down following a proposed review of the projects that were not able to meet their commercial commissioning targets this year.

NREB vice chairman Ernesto B. Pantangco has told reporters that the Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) has asked the renewable energy board to aid in the review process – hinged on the intent of coming up with final calculation that must be considered in the final ruling for the prescribed FIT Allowance.

“Based on the current review, which NREB is doing now, we were asked to assist ERC because if you will note the P0.04 per kWh (kilowatt hour) is based on provisional authority,” he said.

The review, he noted, will also go beyond the 2015 FIT-All rate, but even the degressed FIT for the next round of RE project installations.

Pantangco averred “the ERC is asking NREB together with TransCo (National Transmission Corporation) to re-compute what will be the feed-in-tariff because there are technologies which are oversubscribed – as an example, wind is oversubscribed beyond 200MW.”

He similarly stressed that Energy Secretary Carlos Jericho L. Petilla had told them to consider “the sensitivities of various technologies” in the review process.

For years 2014 and 2015 which the P0.0406 FIT-All had been anchored upon, not all expected projects came on board, so that could also trigger softening effect on the pass-on rate to consumers.

Dinna Dizon, manager of TransCo’s compliance monitoring department, has noted that the current FIT-All rate was based on estimated 450MW of installations coming on stream this year.

But she admitted some projects encountered snags – and while they have been expected to be online this 2015 – others may not really meet their completion targets.

The TransCo executive has acknowledged that the current FIT-All rates being passed on to consumers fully covered the 450MW installations across the specified technologies.

But no payment had been made to any RE developer yet because many of them just had gone through or are still working on their FIT certificates of compliance (COCs) to be issued by the ERC.

“Definitely though, what’s happening is that the next round of tariff is that it will definitely be lower than what has been indicated,” Pantangco stressed.