Gil Johan Chingkiat

MELECT1
Philippines is a country located at the tropical zone, we have abundant supply of rainfall.
Water from the rain can be harvested, store in the dam, and generate electricity. But rain
comes only during the wet season which is about 5 to 6 months a year. In some areas, it is
less, so it is not a hundred percent solution. And we need to combine it with other means of
energy production.
Hydroelectric dam is the key to produce electricity in our country, it does not bring
pollution, production cost is low and we can also use the water for agriculture, but the dam
dry up when the rain stop, and we need a big land area to build dam.
Geothermal energy is another promising source of electricity, we did not exploit this in the
past because of the limited knowledge we have regarding this. With the advances in
technology, we will be able to discover new source of geothermal steam to build more or
expand our electric generation capacity.
The condition needed for a geothermal power plant is the place where the crust of the earth
cracks due to the tectonic movements of the plates, ground water slip through the crack and
hit the molten lava below the earths crust and turn into steam. We capture this steam to
power the huge turbine electric generator.
We also need oil fired power plant when the production from the hydroelectric plant
becomes low. As of now we rely more on oil fired power plants than those using renewable
energy sources mainly because we did not work hard to have renewable energy source plant.
Building oil fired power is easier.
We have tried in the past to operate nuclear power plants, but it did not go well.
Other things such as wind power and solar power plant are still on the experimental stage
and investment cost is very high.
A major shift from fossil fuel plants to renewable energy power plants will demand huge
capital investment; will also make to look at the available infrastructure and topography to
build more hydroelectric and geothermal plants.
For hydroelectric power we need a very large land area preferably at higher level, and a
good supply of rainfall to build a dam and run it efficiently
For geothermal plant we need to find a place where hot steam can be harvested at a shallow
well. That means we should not dig very deep in order to hit steam, and the steam should
come out steadily at the same time the well should have a very long life, at most 50 years or
more.
The Macban geothermal project in Makiling, Laguna and the Tiwi, Albay geothermal
projects is the major renewable energy project undertaken in the Philippines, and this was
done in the time of Marcos. The subsequent president did not pursue the power project
seriously; in fact we have suffered terrible electric shortage during the time of Mrs.
Corazan Aquino. New power plants were built afterward, but they are fossil fuel type which
makes our electricity cost very high.