25 Oct 2013
THE Manila Electric Co. (Meralco) on Friday warned of a possible increase in electricity rates with the scheduled maintenance shutdown of the Malampaya deep water-to-gas field and other power plants.
Generation charge, one of the components of Meralco electricity bills, is expected to shoot up anywhere from P1 to P2 or probably higher, according to Meralco Senior Executive Vice President Ricardo Buencamino during the company’s first nine-month financial and operating results announcement.
The Malampaya power facility, which supplies to three natural gas- fired power plants with a total capacity of 2,700 megawatts, is scheduled to go off-line from November 9 to December 8 to undergo maintenance work.
At the same time, more power plants—Calaca, Pagbilao, Masinloc and Ilijan—are scheduled for maintenance work.
“There will be a shutdown of Malampaya. They actually moved the schedule and this made matters worse because some of the power plants have their own schedules for maintenance shutdown, as well,” Buencamino said.
During the shutdown, Meralco would have to source power from the Wholesale Electricity Spot Market and other power plants that run on diesel, which are more expensive than the natural gas sourced from Malampaya.
Meralco President Oscar Reyes said the utility firm will exert full effort to mitigate the impact of the shutdown of the facilities.
“The shutdown of the Malampaya facility happens once every two years. This shutdown will overlap with the scheduled shutdown of other power plants. This could create an increase and could impact on our generation cost anywhere in the vicinity of P1 to even more than P2,” said Reyes.
The spike in power rates will be reflected in the December billing.
Malampaya now supplies 40 percent of electricity to Luzon. Of the 2.7-trillion cubic feet of reserves in the field off Palawan, an estimated 1.2 trillion cubic feet of natural gas have been used. source
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