January 5, 2025 | 12:00am
MANILA, Philippines — The increasing demand for power continues to fuel the country’s coal consumption, a trend that remains hard to curb despite the government’s strong push to deploy renewables.
In its annual coal report, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said that coal consumption in the Philippines likely grew by five percent to 42 million tons in 2024 from 40 million tons in 2023.
“Power generation primarily drives coal consumption, with most coal imported from Indonesia,” the IEA said.
The IEA is an intergovernmental organization that works with governments and countries to provide data and analysis on the global energy sector.
Given the robust economic outlook of the Philippines, the IEA expects the country’s coal consumption to reach 47 million tons in the next three years.
“Although we anticipate significant growth in renewable energy generation, it will be outpaced by the increase in electricity demand,” it said.
The Department of Energy expects the country’s peak demand to grow by 5.3 percent annually until 2028.
In terms of power generation, 62 percent of the country’s needs were supplied by coal, with renewables only accounting for 22 percent.
Coal-fired power plants are typically regarded as the cheapest among the scheduled base load generation facilities that can operate continuously and provide consistent power to meet the base demand of the grid.
Semirara Mining and Power Corp., the leading coal producer in the Philippines, set a production target of 16 million tons in 2024.
As previously disclosed, it also intends to invest around $5 billion to expand its coal mine operations, which is expected to boost the country’s coal production.
The IEA said the Philippines was the third-largest coal user in Southeast Asia in 2023, accounting for nine percent of the total 457 million tons consumed by the region.
The Philippines was behind Indonesia (48 percent) and Vietnam (21 percent) but slightly ahead of Malaysia (eight percent) in terms of coal consumption.
For 2024, the IEA indicated that ASEAN coal consumption likely increased by eight percent to 491 million tons.
“The region continues to have robust economic growth prospects, accompanied by numerous coal-fired power plants currently under construction,” the IEA said.
“We expect demand for coal in ASEAN to grow by five percent annually and reach 567 Mt (million tons) by 2027,” it added.
In the Philippines, Energy Undersecretary Rowena Cristina Guevara earlier said more coal-fired power plants are set to come online within the next three years.
She has clarified that these projects were proposed and approved before the implementation of a coal moratorium late in 2020 that barred the processing of applications for Greenfield coal facilities.
“Renewables will only begin to overtake (coal) by 2028 as more offshore wind projects are seen wiping out coal by then,” Guevara said.
Under the Philippine Energy Plan, the government wants to scale up the share of renewables in the energy mix to 35 percent by 2030 and 50 percent by 2040.
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