At a time when the country is worried about having sufficient supply of electricity for all its needs, the Quezon City Government has been looking intently at new energy sources in a bid to be able to generate its own power.
Mayor Herbert M. Bautista has announced his plans to have a waste-to-energy (WTE) facility in the city that can convert its entire garbage volume into electricity. About 2,000 tons of trashes are disposed of at the landfill daily, which can possibly produce 36 megawatts of electricity per day. The WTE will significantly scale up present efforts at electricity generation.
Right now, the Payatas Controlled Waste Disposal Facility generates about 40,000 kWh of electricity monthly which is being sold to Meralco and powers up the surrounding areas. The source is Biogas emission Reduction Project which is registered with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) as the country’s first Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). This is aside from the 400-ton capacity Refused Derived Fuel (RDF) pilot plant also in Payatas which gives waste a second life as fuel for cement production. The operation is a partnership between IPM and La Farge Cement.
The mayor also wants to equip some of the city’s public schools with solar panels, to make them self-sufficient for their electricity needs, and perhaps, generate excess power that can be sold to Meralco. He has directed the QC Division of City Schools and the city’s Task Force Streetlights to study the viability of installing solar panels on school roofs.
This follows his previous directive to the task force to oversee the conversion of the city’s streetlights into using light-emmitting diodes (LED), a project designed to cut down the city’s electricity bill by at least 50%. Electricity for streetlights using the existing high pressure sodium (HPS) bulbs account for 64.6% of the total electrical consumption of QC. This is a 5-year project that will involve 22,000 streetlights throughout the city.(Maureen Quiñones, PAISO)
Posted By: Edrillan Pasion
