Excerpt from the study “Solar Powering the Social Housing Sector” written by Enrique E. Villanueva and Maitet Diokno. Produced and published by Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES Philippines).
Socialized housing projects, which are estates of between 200 to thousands of home units, offer an opportunity to demonstrate in the Philippines the advantages and benefits of solar power technology on a larger scale. These estates, meant to provide affordable housing to poorer families, are usually developed and managed by public agencies or by the associations of residents, who can make collective decisions on the adoption of technology for the entire estate.
The advantages of solar are already well known. From a housing perspective, the attractiveness of solar power is that it can be scaled down to supply only a smaller settlement or cluster of households connected to a micro-grid. Moreover, a solar power plant can be installed on a home roof to generate power for that household’s power needs only.
A single home or a cluster of households may also opt to stand alone or go off the grid, relying solely on solar power; or be on the grid, relying both on own solar power generation and power supplied by the existing utilities. On-grid and off-grid set-ups are possible for a household, a cluster of households in a micro-grid, commercial malls, hospitals, and other establishments.
Solar-powered housing communities are still few in the Philippines as investing in solar power technology is still prohibitive for a household or an entire community without a regular source of financing. However, it is also quite possible for organizations dealing in solar power to make the investment themselves in partnership with RE developers. Partner developers may hold ownership of the solar power generation and distribution assets in a housing community until its investments are fully recovered through tariffs. On the brighter side, housing developers may also include solar power generation and distribution investments in the total costs of housing projects that will be refinanced by housing mortgages. Innovative developers should be able to market solar-powered housing as the environment and climate change shape the preferences of home seekers.
In the case of socialized housing projects, this would have to entail prior approval if Pag-IBIG or the Socialized Housing and Finance Corporation (SHFC) to make solar technology part of the financing costs. But this will entail changes in loan composition and loan ceiling since existing loans cover only the cost of land acquisition, site development, and housing construction. Community associations of the urban poor may be sensitive even to slight increases in the monthly amortization obligations of their members arising from additional investments in solar technologies.
Assuming that housing projects with installed solar power generation and distribution technology can be financed, two options are possible. One is solar panel installations on the roof of an individual home that generate electricity only for that household, unconnected to other solar-powered households. It can be either off-grid or on-grid with the existing utility. Ownership of the installed technology is individualized. The other option is a centralized solar plant, also installed on the rooftops, producing large amounts of electricity for the entire housing project. All households are interconnected to the solar power plant, each deriving electricity from a common pool of generated power. In this case, the ownership of the installed power technology cannot be individualized. Ownership, operation, and management can be held by a third-party entity (the investing power company as mentioned).
But consumers may actually organize to put up their own power generation and transmission/distribution systems that use clean, renewable energy in the first place. They can be a consumers’ cooperative/association that will operate these systems, or contract a provider of these systems. Because of the characteristics of solar technology, consumers do not actually have to wait for investors in large solar power plants or wait for existing producers to shift to solar. And even if they have to be just a micro-grid that still needs on-grid connection with existing utilities, they can still choose the power producer to complement their supply, and they can choose clean renewable power sources under the Electric Power Industry Reform Act’s (EPIRA) policy of open access and the Renewable Energy (RE) Act’s Green Energy option.
This is a very concrete way of showing that ordinary people as electricity consumers can save the planet.