Mobile power plants offered as ‘brownout solution’ to PH off-grids

By Myrna M. Velasco – September 22, 2017, 10:00 PM

from Manila Bulletin

Suzhou, China – Brownout-stricken “island grids” or off-grid areas of the Philippines can turn to modular or “mobile power plants” as well as digitally enabled smart grids as solutions to their electricity service woes.

In a roundtable discussion with international journalists, Dr Roland Busch, member of the managing board of German conglomerate Siemens AG, noted that this is a solution that their company has already deployed for an island-grid in Indonesia and is also a fitting solution that they recommend to off-grid areas in the Philippines.

“Philippines is the same with Indonesia, so we can have that solution in your country… it can be done with micro grids that would be smart and have degree of intelligence to address energy service access in these areas,” he said.

These mobile power plants, he explained, are standardized, pre-tested modules that are often easy to transport and install.  Connection to the grid could take at least six months and such facilities can also be expanded based on the demand growth of a particular off-grid domain.

Additionally, they could be operated with flexibility and high degree of reliability. These too are part of the digital power plant solutions that the German firm has been rolling out for target customers and markets.

These propounded solutions are often done with local collaborations, depending on the need of a particular country or customer, the Siemens executive has emphasized. Nevertheless, Dr Busch has indicated two major hurdles that less developed countries, like the Philippines, could still be encountering in their digital solutions pathway – primarily on investment funding and skill-set of domestic human resource.

“The challenges to less-developed countries – number one is: investment. Very often, these less developed countries, they don’t have enough cash for investments, so we would have to find ways how to do that,” he stressed. He noted that the second one is on “capabilities that we have sometimes locally – that we need to put effort into training people.”

However, he acknowledged that such hurdle could “also be an opportunity for us because we will have a chance to help and train them in that area. So we are trying to work with all of them and with investors in different countries, we have particular focus because there could be very many of them and there are similar and different challenges we have been seeing in the energy area.”