The National Energy Authority as the regulator, is mandated to develop policies and clear guidelines, do research and implementation of technologies in the Energy Sector, both in the electricity space and the refine petroleum products.
That’s from National Energy Authority (NEA) Managing Director Mr. Ronald Meketa who said this as he outlined the country’s journey into achieving clean energy.
Mr Keketa stated that the good news is Papua New Guines is not a Coal Burning country and about 40% of our total power generation is fossil fuel and 60% is hydro, so that makes Papua New Guinea to be in the 60% renewable power generation space.
“The 40% refine, petroleum products are mostly diesel, heavy fuel oil and we have 2 new gas turbine power generation limits.”
“In terms of technology now, we are switching from 100% diesel to a dual fuel system, meaning we now have generators that can switch between diesel and gas.”
Mr Meketa added that the new power gas engine power plant at Papa is doing up to 50 mega watts, and they are using gas engines and those are the cleanest sort of technology available and it is currently in the ranking cycle.
“We are already moving into that space and NEA as the regulator, we are focused on key policies, we already have the draft for solar policy, hydro power policies, geothermal policy and wind energy policy, we also working on hydrogen policy as well as clean green harmony policy.”
Mr Meketa further highlighted addition policies that have already been drafted, like the Carbon Capture Storage (CCS) which is a new technology in terms of carbon storage.
“Either we have the forest as the carbon sink hole or we extract CO2 from the air and pump them into a gas reservoir that can store CO2, and we are already applying that in PNG and we are not that far in terms of technology exchanges”.
He added that unlike five years ago, we are now already stepping into having policy guidelines in place, so we are not at the back and trying to catch up on those advancements in technology.
“With PNG having the 2050 vision already in place, given that 40% of our total power generation is based on transitional energy now and we are moving into that space we can achieve renewable energy in less than 10-15 years.”