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  • Fri, 29 March 2024

News

31 March 2022
IEMOP Observes Increasing Demand Levels as Dry Season Enters PH

The Independent Electricity Market Operator of the Philippines (IEMOP) observed an increasing trend in demand as the nation officially enters the dry season. With the demand levels averaging at 10,600 MW this March, the Market Operator of the Wholesale Electricity Spot Market (WESM) noted an 8.38% increase in the previous month’s figure, equivalent to 820 MW.

Additionally, the rise in demand levels in the system may be largely attributable to the imposition of Alert Level 1 in Metro Manila last 01 March, which was later on followed by the implementation of a lesser restrictive alert level status in other provinces that took effect last 16 March. So far, the peak demand of the year was recorded on 23 March which amounted to around 13,749MW; thereby, surpassing the peak demand of the previous month which was at 11,985 MW. Likewise, the said value was noted to surpass the peak demand levels of the previous years during the same month and even that of the annual peak demand during the pre-pandemic year (2019).

The same trend was also evident in the regional peak demand in both Luzon and Visayas. Luzon peak demand was recorded at around 11,617MW which exceeded the annual figures from 2019 to 2021. As for Visayas, its peak demand this month amounted to 2,143 MW which also breached the pre-pandemic levels.

However, the increasing demand was accompanied by sufficient supply levels which amounted to around 13,456 MW or 5.41% (695 MW) greater than that of February 2022. This is mostly due to the resumption of operations by the generators that were on outage at the earlier periods of the year.

Despite the increase in supply, the average margin for this month decreased by 4.04% which then led to an even greater average price of 6.97 PhP/kWh compared to the 6.19 PhP/kwh figure of the last month.

For the market transactions, during the month of February, the spot market transactions accounted for 9.2% percent of all metered quantities or 616 GWh. This is higher than the recorded amount of spot quantities last January which had a 5.1% or 302 GWh share of all the transactions. Meanwhile, the Effective Settlement Spot Price (ESSP) for the said month amounted to 6.51 PhP/kWh which was lower than that of January at 7.02 PhP/kWh.

As the country prepares for the dry season and the upcoming national and local elections, IEMOP will closely monitor the market results in line with its commitment to provide transparent, efficient, and reliable market solutions and services that will power a brighter future for every Filipino household.