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By Euan Paulo C. Añonuevo Reporter
CONSUMERS should brace for higher
electricity bills in the coming months, as the price of energy sold
at the country’s spot market has been shooting up in recent
sessions, according to market operator, the Philippine Electricity
Market Corp. (PEMC).
“Basically what happened in the
past few days is that it took out the coal, so we started clearing
oil—so Malaya, Limay—we’re clearing. So the prices went up to
almost P10 or more than P10 for that period,” Lasse Matti A.
Holopainen, PEMC president, said.
Holopainen is referring to the
rising share of the more expensive oil-based energy traded at the
Wholesale Electricity Spot Market (WESM), as state-owned National
Power Corp. (Napo-cor) began dispatching the crude oil-based power
plants to make up for the failure of coal-fed and hydroelectric
facilities to generate at full capacity.
The use of costlier oil-based
plants to generate the country’s power requirements is due to poor
rainfall, which has prevented hydro plants from running at full
capacity. Hydro plants usually run at full capacity at this time of
the year given the rainy season. Rainfall so far, however, has been
below the levels seen in the past.
Besides hydroelectric plants, the
country normally taps coal-fed generating facilities, but these have
failed to run at full capacity because coal deliveries have been
delayed. The delivery delays and the below-capacity generation of
hydro plants led to eight-hour rotating brownouts across the Luzon
grid last week.
Although the prices of
electricity in the spot market have been volatile the past month,
the recent power interruptions only exacerbated the situation,
pushing prices further up, Holopainen said.
Since last summer, when the
country faced similar power troubles, PEMC has been seeing pricing
error notices at the spot market. A pricing error means it is unsure
if there is going to be enough electricity or not, as nobody’s
bidding at the market.
“We just told the Department of
Energy and the Energy Regulatory Commission about the pricing error
notices, but right now I guess they were more concerned about the
actual physical security rather than price. But again it’s a
precursor and you can use the market to start seeing these
things,” he said.
PEMC’s market surveillance
committee is already looking into the pricing errors to determine
whether they were caused by a “capacity withholding issue.”
“But again if it’s [a] fuel
sourcing issue, again I think that is national in terms of security
of supply is primary and it’s not even the economic policy. But
again, that’s beyond the market, that’s more of system security
and policy issue as to how much fuel should be stocked up,”
Holoainen said.
Although beyond the scope of
PEMC’s responsibility, he said there is still a need to ensure
that fuel supplies in the country’s other power plants are
adequate to prevent a repeat of last week’s outage.
“Forget about the price of
power for the meantime. We have to talk about getting power to the
household everyday, which is more important than the market and than
the price,” he said.
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