January 16, 2019 | 12:02 am
ABOITIZ Power Corp.
walked away from offering a retail electricity supply contract to Hanjin Heavy
Industries and Construction Philippines (HHIC-Philippines) ahead of the
expiration of their one-year contract in February this year, sparing the energy
company from the issues surrounding the financial woes faced by the South
Korean company.
“The price that they
were asking us is too low. We’re better off offering it to another customer,”
Emmanuel V. Rubio, AboitizPower chief operating officer, told reporters on Tuesday
during an informal gathering on Tuesday.
“It’s not unusual.
We’ve walked away from other customers,” he added.
HHIC-Philippines was
previously a customer of Subic Enerzone Corp., another Aboitiz-led company and
the local distribution utility in the area, before it signed up for a one-year
contract with AboitizPower retail electricity supply (RES) unit Advent Energy,
Inc.
“The contract, which
ends in February this year, was won by another RES,” Mr. Rubio said, but
declining to name the winning power supplier.
Advent is one of five
Aboitiz-led retail electricity suppliers and the group’s biggest in terms of
customer demand at 235.78 megawatts (MW) as of October last year. Aboitiz
Energy Solutions, Inc. has the biggest number of customers at 156, beating
Advent’s 77 total count as of the same period.
The other RES units are
SN Aboitiz Power-RES, Inc., San Fernando Light & Power, PRISM Energy, Inc.
and Mazzaraty Energy Corp.
AboitizPower said the
local Hanjin unit had been a long-standing customer of Subic Enerzone, starting
in 2008 with sales of around 4 MW, and peaking at one point to 95 MW.
Hanjin’s switch to
Advent as its power supplier is called for under the rules on retail
competition and open access (RCOA), which calls for contestable customers to move
away from being part of the captive market of a distribution utility.
These are customers
whose electricity consumption for the past 12 months has reached the threshold
set by the Energy Regulatory Commission. — Victor V. Saulon
No comments:
Post a Comment