Net metering is empowering electric consumers in the Philippines.
The scheme is embodied in the Philippines’ Renewable Energy Act of 2008 – considered to be the most comprehensive renewable energy law in Southeast Asia.
It allows electric consumers to sell power to the grid at an approved feed-in tariff and buy power as necessary at the normal retail tariff.
The feed-in tariff will provide a guaranteed fixed price for at least 12 years for electricity produced from emerging renewable resources: wind, solar power, ocean, run-of-river hydropower, and biomass.
With net metering, the consumer generates electricity at the point of use, and is able to supply excess electricity generated into the grid, either earning revenue or reducing net payable consumption.
Net metering provides a regulatory basis for distributed and decentralized energy systems and at the same time provides a powerful incentive for end-use efficiency improvements. Net metering can be combined with feed-in-tariffs to promote renewable energy generation in decentralized applications.
It is one of the many responses that countries in Asia and the Pacific – most notably China, Japan and South Korea – have made in supporting green growth.
Asia and the Pacific now lead the globe in commitments to green investments, including low-carbon power generation (renewable energy and carbon capture and storage), energy and fuel efficiency (buildings, public transport and electricity grids), and water supply and waste management.
The region has made “green” policy commitments and investments that just five years ago would have been unimaginable, according to a new report by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the United Nations. “Green economies are more economically and politically feasible than ever before.”
The ADB, United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) released the report “Green Growth, Resources, and Resilience” this week.
These strategies now include building codes for energy and water conservation (Singapore); energy and water efficiency incentives, price restructuring (Singapore); independent/decentralized power production (Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand); And green procurement (China, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines); information tools, including public disclosure and ecolabelling (China, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines).
The Philippines has institutionalized Environmental Performance Rating and Public Disclosure (EPRD) informally known as green watch programs.
The Department of Environment and Natural Resources implemented in 1998 its own EPRD program named the Industrial Ecowatch System. The Laguna Lake Development Authority has been particularly active implementing an Ecowatch System and rated and disclosed the names of more than 700 enterprises in 2008.
The willingness of the private sector to invest in sustainable natural resource management may be higher than expected. In the Philippines, an ADB study of 25 government and privately owned companies demonstrated that 84 percent of the companies were convinced of the business case for investments in ecosystem services.
Great cost
In the last two decades, the report observes, growth rates of Asian and Pacific economies were among the highest in the world. The strong economic growth has lifted more than half a billion of its people out of poverty and has raised living standards.
Progress was achieved at great environmental cost, involving intensive use of resources that has accelerated the degradation of natural resources and the production of waste and emissions.
The triple food, fuel and financial crisis that came to a head in late 2008 resulted in a global recession, unemployment, hunger and social conflict.
One of the major challenges facing the region will be overcoming resource constraints, including energy, minerals, water and land, as people strive to achieve higher living standards.
Between 1995 and 2005, Asian and Pacific consumption of four main types of materials – biomass, fossil fuels, metal ores/industrial minerals and construction minerals – grew by 50 percent, from 23.6 billion tons to around 35.3 billion tons.
Since the mid-1990s, the region has accounted for well over half of global material use, overtaking all other regions combined.
As of 2005, the Asian and Pacific region required three times the input of resources as the rest of the world to produce one unit of GDP.
Ominously, the report observes, material intensity in the region increased from 2000 to (at least) 2005, reversing previous trends. The main reason for this reversal is that economic activity in the region, as well as in the world, is shifting away from relatively more efficient centers of production, such as Japan, to relatively more resource-intensive centers of production, such as China.
If these trends continue, extractive pressures on the environment will increase even faster than the rapid rates of economic growth. Large amounts of sand, gravel and other bulk construction materials, for example, are being used to build rapidly-expanding cities and transport infrastructure and for manufacturing.
Perhaps most significant is the higher per capita consumption of transport fuels as a result of rapid motorization.
According to UNEP, the region consumes at least 80 billion tons of materials and 700 exajoules of energy per year; carbon dioxide emissions are likely to more than triple by 2050.
Perhaps most significantly, there are growing concerns about both the adequacy and stability of food supply, particularly in light of the continuing food price rises.
Food supply is being affected by a number of factors, including low crop yields, rising input costs, competing demands for freshwater, loss of farm land for housing and industry and neglect of investment.
The competition for land and changing market forces mean that production of non-food crops is expanding faster than production of food crops, as in Asia and the Pacific.
