ERC to act on DU applications within the 75-day window to issue provisional authority
Those pesky rotating brownouts could linger till Christmas and beyond even if there is additional power to address the growing power demand in Cagayan de Oro.
Although the Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) is currently holding marathon deliberations this week on all pending applications for power supply agreements, the agency does have a 75-day window within which to issue the provisional authority needed by distribution utilities like the Cagayan Electric Power and Light Co. (Cepalco).
Original Minergy 3-6.3 MW Diesel Power Plant
The utility earlier said it already had 10 megawatts of diesel power available since August from its affiliate Mindanao Energy Systems (Minergy) but have so far been unable to feed it to the franchise area since ERC has not yet acted on its application for provisional authority.
Under its application filed with the ERC, the rate impact for the additional 10MW of power from Minergy on all types of customers including bulk, commercial/industrial and residential was estimated at P0.22 per kilowatt hour.
“That’s very small (P0.22/KwH) impact to the rate compared to having no energy or brownouts, noted Oro Chamber President Cereal C. Donggay, a former vice president of the state owned National Power Corporation, now the Power Sector Assets and Liabilities Management Corp. (PSALM).
Under the present load shedding schedule issued by Cepalco to its consumers, customers have been grouped into four brownout schedules which last two and a half hours each. However, the load dropping have been resorted to by the utility only when its allocation from PSALM drops beyond its ability to address the deficit with its embedded power sources including solar, hydro and diesel.
Minergy Expansion 3-6.3 MW Diesel Power Plant
“The bad news concerning the ERC is that approval of PSAs takes at least six months or longer, except in the unique case of the approval of an overpriced PSA for a coal plant in Villanueva, which took only two months to be given final approval,” noted David A. Tauli, president of the power advocacy group Mindanao Coalition of Power Consumers (MCPC).
“So customer appeals to the ERC are not really going to speed up the process of approval. I don’t know what inducement was offered by the applicant coal power plant to speed up approval of their application,” he added.
But Tauli believes the appointment of a new ERC chairperson auger well for DUs who are still waiting for their provisional authority to be acted upon after extended periods.
“The good news about ERC is that they have a new Chairman who was an academician and not a politician. So there may come about changes in the ERC that would speed up approval of PSAs,” Tauli said.
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