ONE MORE TIME: HOW MUCH WILL YOU REALLY PAY FOR SOLAR? 17.95 , 15, 2.28, 1.14 or even less? In pesos or in centavos? Fixed, fluctuating or declining? The answers will surprise you.
It’s been on full throttle: a massive concerted campaign to discredit renewal technologies, particularly solar; a clear demonizing effort at upending and pulling the rug under a Renewables law that took years in the making, and is yet to be carried out, after its passage of almost three years ago. The strategy is to fiercely latch on to feed in tariffs (FiTs), expressed in pesos per kwhr, while deliberately ignoring their retail impact, expressed in centavos. Then to stridently hammer at this thought to prove the technology is too expensive to adopt.
Feed-in Tariffs are cost-based, regulator-determined rates that each RE technology will charge each kwhr consumed for a specified period of time. Their aim is two-fold: to deploy clean energy while keeping their rate impact minimal; and to raise world demand higher, thereby forcing suppliers to further drop their costs, spawning a mutually reinforcing interaction between supply and demand.
Solar PVs are clean, embedded, scalable in size to meet rising demand, can displace oil fired units during the day; and are installable in months not years – a unique trait that will help relieve, the fastest, without harming the environment and public health, the worsening power crisis in Mindanao, where reserves range from very little to none at all. Inadequacy in reserves means that peak and intermediate plants are immediately required. (The grid has began to intermittently suffer blackouts and there is no improvement in sight).
