CREZ Vision
The DOE launched the CREZ process to help achieve the country’s goals of scaling up RE generation on the power system and to ensure sustainable, secure, reliable, accessible, and affordable energy. The CREZ process identifies the most economic RE resource areas so transmission planning and expansion can accelerate their development (Box 1). By proactively focusing transmission expansion to these resource areas, RE generation development obstacles such as transmission access, energy curtailment, land permitting (such as protected or high-slope areas), and regulatory barriers are easier to overcome thus, reducing risk for private sector RE investment. New transmission stemming from the CREZ process will help all RE resources in the Philippines, including wind, solar, geothermal, biomass, and hydropower.
The CREZ process in the Philippines is informed by successful RE zone projects in the United States and other countries, which demonstrate that successful proactive transmission planning for renewables:
- Helps integrate significant RE capacity
- Eliminates regulatory bottlenecks
- Avoids land permitting obstacles
- Drives competition
- Reduces costs
- Supports efficient, reliable, and resilient power system operation.
The CREZ process also complements other policies supporting small-scale and distributed indigenous RE resource development and the overall energy diversification policy. It is one tool in the government’s suite of policies to costeffectively accelerate deployment of large-scale RE in the Philippines.
Explore the CREZ on RE Data Explorer
RE Data Explorer is a no-cost, user-friendly geospatial analysis tool for analyzing RE potential and informing decisions, developed by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
Explore additional CREZ Data for the Philippines on RE Data Explorer: