The Philippines needs ‘power of all sorts’ to build energy security following a nationwide crisis, says Prime Infra CEO Guillaume Lucci

To engineer-turned-corporate executive Guillaume Lucci, there’s a straightforward solution to the Philippines’ ongoing energy emergency.

“What we need is more energy of all sorts, not only more renewable energy,” Lucci, the CEO of Filipino infrastructure firm Prime Infra, tells Fortune at the firm’s headquarters in Pasay City, Manila. “We don’t see energy reliability and affordability as being decoupled from decarbonization, but for now, we need a bit of everything.”

When the U.S.-Iran war broke out in February, shuttering the Strait of Hormuz and halting oil flows from the Gulf, there were few countries as hard hit as the Philippines. The archipelagic Southeast Asian country, which imports 98% of its oil from the Gulf, declared a nationwide energy emergency on March 24, which President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. said would remain in effect for a year.

Lucci’s pragmatic all-of-the-above approach cuts against some of the more purist energy transition narratives dominating Western capitals. In a country that imports almost all of its fuel from the Gulf, and had just 45 days of buffer supply during one point in the Iran crisis, he argues that reliability, affordability, and decarbonization can’t be sequenced neatly but must be pursued in parallel. 

Prime Infra’s sprawling portfolio in the Philippines, from the Malampaya gas field to the Wawa hydropower dam and a nascent waste-to-energy business, is a test case for whether a diversified mix of assets can deliver resource security for a vulnerable emerging economy.

Lucci says that people often don’t understand how long it takes to build green infrastructure, adding that humanity needs stop-gap measures as they’re being constructed and scaled. (The Wawa dam, for example, was constructed between 2021 and 2025, and only began operations late last year.) “We’ve evolved and transitioned dramatically over the past 50 years, it’s just that infrastructure is so complex,” he says. “These projects take a long time to be built, mature and show returns. It’s a slow-moving process, but one that’s continuously in motion.”

Aside from energy, Prime Infra’s other focus areas—water and waste management—also reflect the Philippines’ most urgent national priorities. According to international non-profit Water.org, 59 million........

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