Interruptible Load Program participation of JFC member firms

ECCP is involved in various discussions to avoid the crisis of 3-hour rotating power outage expected to hit Luzon in early 2015.

Energy efficiency is one area we are working on; another is the Interruptable Load Program (ILP) which is one of the available instruments to help ease the anticipated power supply deficit. The ILP calls on industry players with relatively large stand-by generators in their offices or plants to run these during peak hours for about 10 hours a day, being paid for the variable costs plus a fair mark-up.

ECCP joined a recent PCCI forum-dialogue on the ILP where the Energy Regulatory Commission and Meralco presented the rules governing the ILP and its implementing mechanism, respectively. Copies of their presentations are sent here for your reference.

Targeted ILP contributors are electricity consumers with large embedded generation capacities of at least one MW. De-loading compensation paid to ILP participants will be recovered from all customers of the district utility as part of its total cost of power to be included in its monthly computation of generation rate. PCCI pointed out that the impact of the program to the general consumer is less than a centavo per kWh. Meralco cited that for the 16 May application when Metro Manila had experienced short power supply, de-loading compensation amounted to about PhP 300,000, translating to an additional cost of two centavos on the monthly bill of customers consuming 200 kWh and sparing 50,000 households from the one-hour rotating blackouts.

At present Meralco has about 115 MW committed to the ILP and hopes to reach at least 500 MW.

Contestable customers, however, are impeded to participate in the program which is available only to the captive market. The Retail Electricity Suppliers Association (RESA) and Meralco are in the final stages of discussions on creating a possible mechanism that will allow contestable customers under RESA to contribute to the ILP. The Department of Energy in coordination with RESA and Meralco will conduct a series of consultative talks to explain the final working mechanism and solicit inputs on how to make the program viable to the contestable market.

An ECCP member company has already expressed readiness to participate in the program with its combined installed actual capacities of about 30.7 MW in their key sites mostly across Luzon. We hope more of our members will be willing to sign up for the ILP.

Will there be interest from your respective memberships to join the program?

Regards,