Inclusion of liquefied natural gas under DOE's green energy program questioned in House

House Deputy Minority Leader France Castro on Thursday questioned the Department of Energy's (DOE) policy of including liquified natural gas (LNG) under its Green Energy Option Auction (GEA) Program, saying LNG is not renewable and therefore can't be considered green energy.

Castro made the point during DOE's presentation of its proposed P2.1 billion budget for 2025 before the House appropriations committee after Energy Secretary Raphael Lotilla confirmed that LNG is methane and therefore a conventional fossil fuel that cannot be classified as renewable energy.

The GEA program facilitates investments in renewable energy in a bid to achieve the target of 35% renewable energy in the energy mix by 2035 and 50% by 2040. 

The program also seeks to ensure competitive selection of firms to obtain rights to develop renewable energy capacity.

"What appears now is the GEA is being conveniently used or abused by the DOE to award power supply agreements. These are the LNG and nuclear power supply contracts are being contemplated to be done under the GEA," Castro said.

"Parang nililito niyo po ang taumbayan (It's like you're fooling the people). We say LNG is under GEA but this is not green energy," Castro added.

In response, Lotilla said that the DOE had to include LNG under its GEA program because the supply of green or renewable sources of energy, such as solar and wind, is not constantly reliable.

"Renewable energy in the form of solar and wind for example, are variable. Their supply is constantly changing so therefore, we cannot rely entirely on variable renewable energy," Lotilla said.

“We need a source of power to balance it. There are various ways of balancing [source of] power. One is for example to rely on diesel, which is also fossil fuel. The other is on energy storage systems, but energy storage systems are quite costly at this particular time, particularly batteries," the DOE chief added.

Lotilla then said that there is a need to tap natural gas power plants to do the balancing in order to regulate the flow of renewable energy.

"It is not that... hindi natin gustong maglinlang ng taumbayan (It is not our intention to fool the people)... but we want to be forthright or to be frank with our people that at this time, we still need fossil fuels to balance the variable renewable energy," he said. —KBK, GMA Integrated News