The Independent Electricity Market Operator of the Philippines (IEMOP) noted that the May 2021 peak demand for electricity was recorded at 13,660 MW – which is 1,263 MW greater than that of the April 2021 values. The same goes for the regional peak demand wherein the Luzon peak demand reported an increase this June – from 11,591 to 11,601 MW – as well as that of Visayas – from 2,151 to 2,177 MW.
Supply on the other hand, was greatly affected by generator outages and deratings. The outages, which reached as high as 2,396 MW and deratings of 4,984 MW, triggered yellow and red alert warnings, particularly on 31 May and 01 June 2021. Market interventions were also called for several intervals by the System Operator, the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP), due to Manual Load Dropping as a result of generation deficiency. With the tight supply conditions, the Secondary Price Cap was imposed for 55 and 103 for the months of May and June[1], respectively, as the average price breached the P9/kWh threshold. The Secondary Price Cap is a price-mitigating mechanism imposed when there are persistent high market prices. This resulted to an Effective Settlement Spot Price (ESSP) for the month of May of 8.31 P/kWh which is double than that of the April 2021 ESSP of 4.04 P/kWh or around 105.69%. Moreover, the total generation for the May market transactions was recorded at 7,236 GWh which is higher than the previous month’s record of 6,818 GWh. Likewise, the spot percentage of the said month increased from 7.7% to 9.6% in comparison to that of April 2021.
Generation mix for the month of May continued to be dominated by coal power plants which generated 56.1% of the supply. This is a slight increase from its generation last month of 54.6%. Likewise, an increase in the generation of oil-based power plants, which are usually dispatched only during peak hours, was observed – from 1.1% to 3.1%. Meanwhile, the generation from natural gas, geothermal, hydro, wind, and solar plants decreased while that of biomass remained consistent coming from the month of April.
On the other hand, for the first twenty (20) days of June 2021, a decreased demand and a slight improvement in supply was observed which reflected a decrease in the resulting market prices with an average of P 6.53/kWh.
IEMOP also announced the Go-Live of the Enhanced WESM Design and Operations (EWDO), or the Five-Minute WESM, on 26 June 2021. For the Luzon and Visayas Market Participants, this entails the implementation of a 5-minute scheduling pricing, and market settlement. However, dispatch compliances will be relaxed for the first three (3) months or until 25 September 2021 in order to provide market participants ample time to adjust to the new trading interval.
Meanwhile, for Mindanao, a WESM Central Scheduling will initially be implemented for one (1) month in order to provide time for some participants to complete the registration process after which a relaxed compliance period of three (3) months will be implemented to enable the Mindanao participants to adjust as well to the market based scheduling and pricing mechanisms.
To mark this historic milestone, IEMOP initiated the “AmpliFIVE” campaign which covers the switchover activities as the Market Participants gear up and switch to the five-minute market.
[1] Data only covers until 20 June 2021.
