Our world relies heavily on coal, the black, carbon-rich combustible fossil fuel, for its electricity. According to the International Energy Agency, 38.4% of the electricity generated worldwide in 2016 came from coal.
In the Philippines, coal is an even more dominant power source. It accounted for 51,932 gigawatt hours (GWh) or roughly 52% of the 99,765 GWh of total power generated in 2018, according to recently released data from the Department of Energy (DoE).
But burning coal to produce electricity emits significant levels of greenhouse gases, chief among which is carbon dioxide. Greenhouse gases, which also include chlorofluorocarbons, trap heat in the atmosphere, causing the planet to heat up. Since the industrial revolution, so much greenhouse gas has been pumped into the atmosphere that the planet has warmed considerably. Through human activity, the situation has aggravated, rising to alarming heights compared to pre-industrial levels.
A relentlessly warming planet means rising sea levels and more destructive and frequent storms, hurricanes, droughts and heat waves — all of which put our lives at risk.
The Philippines is among the most seriously impacted by this phenomenon, despite the fact that it does not emit as much greenhouse gases as, for example, the United States and India. A 2018 report by the multinational banking giant HSBC found that the country is the third most vulnerable to the risks posed by climate change.
Clearly, now is the time to shift to cleaner, more sustainable power generation, to embrace renewable sources of energy.
Needless to say, generating electricity from renewables — water, wind, sun, heat inside the Earth — helps mitigate climate change, as these sources produce practically no greenhouse gas emissions. They will also never be depleted, unlike fossil fuels.
For a long time, however, there’s been a reluctance among electricity producers, distributors and consumers to embrace renewables due to the belief that it’s too costly to generate electricity from them compared with coal and other fossil fuels.
That may have been true in the past. The reality today is that it’s getting cheaper to create electricity from renewables. The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) noted in a 2018 report that the global weighted average levelized cost of electricity of utility-scale solar photovoltaics, which convert sunlight into electricity, had dropped by an astounding 73% since 2010 to $0.10 per kilowatt hour (kWh) for new projects commissioned in 2017.
That same year, the global weighted average cost of electricity from new hydropower projects was $0.05 per kWh. For onshore wind projects, it was $0.06 per kWh, while for bioenergy and geothermal projects the cost per kWh was $0.07.
In comparison, the fossil fuel-fired electricity generation costs for G20 countries ranged from $0.05 to $0.17 per kWh, according to a report published on climatereality.org
In the Philippines, power is increasingly being produced from renewables. Based on the latest DoE data, renewables — geothermal, hydro, biomass, solar and wind — accounted for 23,326 GWh of total power generated. That’s a significant jump from 20,628 GWh 10 years ago.
By increasing the share of renewables in its power generation mix, the country will be better able to wean itself from its dependence on coal. (Around 75% of the country’s coal supply is sourced from other countries, notably Indonesia.)
Renewables, however, are still quite far from becoming many countries’ sole source of electricity. For one, some of them are intermittent, which means that they’re not continuously available, depending on certain environmental conditions. Producing energy from the sun, for instance, is hindered when it’s nighttime or when the sky is cloudy.
One solution has been to store the energy generated from renewables in batteries, but how to do it efficiently and cheaply on a large scale remains elusive.
While the quest to figure that out is ongoing, natural gas — heralded as the “bridge fuel” between our current coal dependence and a totally renewable future — is gaining traction.
Though a fossil fuel, this gas found underground burns much cleaner than coal, emitting as much as 60% less carbon dioxide. What’s more, it is affordable. An examination of publicly available data from Manila Electric Co. or Meralco, the only power distributor in Metro Manila, reveals that since 2016, the costs of generating power from natural gas have consistently been lower than those from coal.
In addition, natural gas plants, compared with coal plants, are more flexible and efficient. They can quickly adjust the electricity they provide, ramping up production when needed. And they can generate a large amount of electricity from a relatively small amount of fuel, helping keep their generation costs affordable and producing less emissions in the process.
Natural gas plants can also start up quickly and reach full load in a short period of time. One of the handful of natural gas plants operating in the Philippines, the Avion Open-Cycle Natural Gas-Fired Power Plant, owned by First Gen Corporation, can reach its full capacity in less than 15 minutes, a far cry from the roughly 11 hours it takes a typical coal plant to do the same.
Last year, 21,334 GWh of power was generated from natural gas in the country, higher than 19,576 GWh from a decade ago, according to DoE data. This is a welcome development.
There’s a compelling complementarity between natural gas and renewables. When there’s not enough power from renewables, natural gas plants can pick up the slack. Together, these sources of energy help ensure uninterrupted power supply, which is crucial to achieving economic prosperity.
Moving toward a renewable future is imperative, especially as the effects of climate change continue to worsen. And with the help of natural gas, it’s only a matter of time until that future becomes the present.
