The Independent Electricity Market Operator of the Philippines (IEMOP) said average price of power prices in the wholesale electricity spot market (WESM) may remain elevated this month as secondary price caps continue to be triggered.
The secondary price cap is being implemented to protect consumers from sustained high power rates with WESM’s inherent volatile market movements and lowers the clearing price of electricity to P6.245 per kilowatt hour (kWh) when average prices breach the threshold of P9 per kWh over a 72-hour period.
IEMOP said in an online briefing yesterday the imposition of secondary price caps for the first few days of July is still “frequent” with the said mechanism triggered 35 percent of the time in the June billing month.
The warning was issued by IEMOP after announcing that average price of electricity in the WESM in Luzon and Visayas for June increased by over 37 percent to P8.51 per kWh from last month’s P6.21 per kwh.
IEMOP said the upward adjustment was mainly due to decreased supply availability for the month while demand went up apart from the fact that prices in the WESM are also largely dependent on the offer price of generators which considers fuel prices which have also surged in recent months.
For the period June 1 to 25, average power supply available in WESM hit 15,214 megawatts (MW), over 1 percent lower from April’s 15,406 MW.
IEMOP said average demand for the period went up by over 0.5 percent to 11,325 MW from 11,259 MW.
The figures collated by IEMOP only reflect the situation in the Luzon and Visayas grids as Mindanao is not yet fully connected to the WESM.
