Electricity rates charged by the Manila Electric Co. to its customers will go up this month as supply tightened last month.
“We expect the movement of the November generation charge to be on an upward adjustment primarily due to two main factors,” Meralco spokesperson Joe Zaldarriaga said.
Zaldarriaga said these are the uptick in spot market prices due to last month’s maintenance shutdown of the Malampaya gas production facility and the decline in the net settlement surplus refund of the Wholesale Electricity Spot Market.
“WESM charges may be slightly higher due to a more challenged power supply situation seen in the recent supply month,” he explained.
He added that the four-day Malampaya scheduled maintenance from Oct. 12 to 15 also resulted in “unavailability of some natural gas plants,” that, in turn, triggered the declaration of “yellow alert” incidents by system operator National Grid Corp. of the Philippines.
A yellow alert condition in a power grid does not necessarily result in rolling brownouts, but this entails strained supply and lack of reserves in the system and when more plants conk out, power service interruptions could ensue.
“There were also some power plants that tripped and went on forced outages. And as a result, Luzon grid had two yellow alerts,” the Meralco executive noted.
NGCP yesterday placed the Luzon grid on yellow alert again due to outages of some plants from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. (Myrna Velasco)