ERC defers issuance of bid price for run-of-river hydro

Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) Chairperson and CEO Monalisa C. Dimalanta | PHOTO: Official Facebook page of ERC / Energy Regulatory Commission

The release of the bid price for run-of-river hydropower, a renewable energy technology to which related concessions will be up for auction in 2025, has been “deferred for further consideration,” according to the Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC).

This was based on a document dated Dec. 17, 2024, and posted on the ERC’s website, related to the third round of the government’s Green Energy Auction Program.

The regulator said a decision was put off “given the pending issues that need to be resolved.”

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Sought for more details, ERC chair and chief executive officer Monalisa Dimalanta said the Commission was “clarifying a policy matter with the DOE (Department of Energy).”

Dimalanta said such a matter was related to the supposed “parallel implementation” of the Feed-In-Tariff (FIT) and Green Energy Auction Program (GEAP) for run-of-river hydro.

FIT is another initiative meant to provide fixed rates to emerging clean power sources, including hydro. GEAP, meanwhile, is designed to accelerate the transition to renewable energy.

Run-of-river refers (ROR) to hydropower generation facilities that use the natural flow of water from a river through a channel to spin a turbine.

ROR systems are usually smaller than hydropower plants that use a dam to store water in a reservoir, from which the water is released through a turbine.

“We noted that there is still unsubscribed capacity for FIT for this technology, yet there is additional capacity allocated for GEAP,” she said Friday.

“This may confuse stakeholders and may render one policy to conflict with the other. We are asking for DOE’s on the way forward considering we are also reviewing the FIT rate for ROR hydro,” Dimalanta added.

Mylene Capongcol, director of the Renewable Energy Management Bureau of the DOE, said the third round of the GEAP may be delayed to January 2025.

The DOE’s initial target was to complete GEA Round 3 within this year.

This, as the ERC has yet to release its price determination methodology for the GEA reserve price or the maximum price offer set in the bidding, is one of the items required to pursue the program.

The new round of clean power bidding will focus on geothermal, impounding hydro and pumped-storage hydro, and ROR hydro.

Meanwhile, Capongcol also said the DOE may release this December the notice of auction and terms of reference for the GEA-4, which would cover integrated renewable energy and energy storage systems (IRESS).

The DOE earlier said IRESS is “the integration of renewable energy sources with energy storage technologies like batteries, flywheels, or pumped storage hydropower systems.”