Why Philippines’ Smart Grid lags behind neighbors

An industry player laments on Philippine government’s failure to deliver initiative.

Asian Power sat with the top management of the consultancy firm of the first ever smart grid project in the country during the Singapore International Energy Week to share with us his insights.

“The Philippines is quite far from where other countries are in smart grid but I call it quite inevitable happening so hopefully the Philippines can catch up,” said Marnie S. Tolosa, strategic business development manager for smart connected strategies and solutions of Cisco.

“Similar on how other countries support other smart grids or energy efficiency, I expect more active participations from the government hopefully through private-public partnerships (PPP). Unfortunately, President Noynoy Aquinos’ PPP programs are mostly on the road infrastructure but there are no PPP programs on energy efficiency. So hopefully they can include it as part of the program,” he said.

According to Mr. Tolosa, smart grid programs are initiated by the private sector and none comes from the government.

“Smart grid is still in the evangelization stage. Ou rmarket is reactive to energy usage so hopefully we’ll be there soon, sooner than expected,”

Currently, CISCO holds five of more than fifty smart grid projects in the Philippines as a consultancy firm. It includes the first ever smart grid project called as the “Smart Home” by the Greenfield Development Corp. located in Mandaluyong.It started with two residential towers built for smart systems.

The other smart grid projects that CISCO holds are those being developed by ALphaland, Arthaland, PICAR and Global Gateway.