‘P430 billion needed to electrify every Filipino home’

MANILA, Philippines — It would require roughly $7 billion (around P430.4 billion) to end energy poverty in the Philippines and bring electricity to millions of homes still left in the dark, according to microgrid developer WEnergy Global.

Citing data collected over the past 10 years, WEnergy Global CEO Atem Ramsundersingh said the investment would be needed to electrify about 2.7 million Filipino households, particularly in remote, far-flung areas.

“They don’t just want a light bulb; they want more,” Ramsundersingh said in an interview with The STAR, stressing how energy poverty limits opportunities and keeps many Filipinos from fully building their lives.

He said the absence of critical energy infrastructure in rural communities continues to deny millions access to the basic promise of reliable electricity.

While energy firms can deploy significant equity toward household electrification, he noted that more is still needed to close the gap, urging banks to step up and play a larger role in financing the effort.

“The availability of debt financing is still at a preliminary stage. It is not easy to convince the local banks to finance microgrids,” Ramsundersingh said.

Some private lenders, he said, view efforts to bring electricity to remote areas as not bankable, shaped by a “prejudice” against rural communities.

Ramsundersingh, however, said people in rural communities have “proper purchasing power” and ambitions that are, at times, even greater than those living in the metro.

“They’re not ambitionless,” he pointed out. “They want to get out of that energy poverty.”

In the Philippines, WEnergy and its partners are investing around P2.1 billion to develop 24 microgrid systems that could power more than 11,000 households across unserved and underserved communities in Palawan, Cebu and Quezon.

This marks the country’s largest private-sector investment in rural electrification to date.

A microgrid is a localized energy network with clearly defined electrical boundaries that integrates power generation, storage and distribution. It is typically not connected to the country’s main power grids.

According to Ramsundersingh, building a microgrid system could take just seven to 10 months. However, the main challenge lies in the permitting process, which can stretch up to seven years.

While policies such as the Microgrid Systems Act and the Certificate of Energy Project of National Significance (CEPNS) are already in place, he said “unnecessary bureaucracy” continues to make it difficult for developers to move projects forward.

“Technology and capital are not the only obstacles at this point to get all Filipinos electrified. It’s still a bit of a non-synchronized bureaucracy,” Ramsundersingh said, highlighting the lack of alignment among government agencies.

On paper, projects granted CEPNS status are supposed to receive priority processing and expedited approvals from permitting agencies and other relevant authorities.

But in practice, the WEnergy executive said, the reality on the ground is different.

This challenge is not unique to microgrid projects, as even power generation companies have raised similar concerns.

A top executive of a renewable power firm earlier told The STAR that priority tags granted by the Department of Energy (DOE) and the Board of Investments seem ineffective when confronted with local government barriers.