A waste-to-energy facility is needed to convert Quezon City’s garbage into electricity and help ease a looming power crisis, Mayor Herbert Bautista said Sunday.
He made the statement even as Malacañang urged the public to save on electricity to avoid blackouts in the future.
Bautista said the city’s 142 villages were producing at least 2,000 tons of trash that could produce 36 megawatts of electricity a day but were being disposed of at the Payatas dump daily.
The establishment of such facility would significantly help in the effort to address the looming power shortage, Bautista said.
“Right now, the Payatas-controlled waste disposal facility generates about 40,000 kilowatts per hour of electricity monthly that is being sold to the Manila Electric Company to power up the surrounding areas,” he said.
The facility is a biogas emission-reduction project registered with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and is the country’s first clean-development mechanism.
Bautista has also ordered city officials to study the viability of installing solar panels on school roofs and to use light-emitting diodes to cut down the city’s power bill by 50 percent.
The electricity for the streetlights using sodium bulbs accounts for 64.6 percent of the city government’s total power consumption.