A ranking official of the Aboitiz group urges the government to start implementing the wholesale electricity spot market in the Visayas to address the looming power supply shortage there.

Luis Miguel Aboitiz, senior vice president of the Aboitiz Power Corp., said WESM implementation was needed with the expected coming in online of some plants next year.

"I’m hoping they start the WESM Visayas as soon as the first new unit comes online in the Visayas. The first unit will be around in March next year. WESM in the Visayas will help alleviate the power problem," Aboitiz said.

He said the company expects that 82 megawatts of power would come in March in Western Cebu and another 80MW in June and then another 80 MW in September.

In 2006, the Energy Regulatory Commission approved the creation and establishment of WESM in Luzon, which serves as the trading floor of electricity.

Abotiz also said that the recent approval of the Visayas Supply Augmentation Auction plan, but has yet to be implemented due to some glitches, might be too late if the government failed to act on it immediately.

"The VSAA was approved but the conditions to the approval made it no longer feasible to implement in a practical manner. I think the Philippine Electricity Market Corp. applied with the ERC and asked for reconsideration," he said.

"But it's already getting pretty late, if does not get the ruling in time, we might just implement the WESM Visayas – and then in which case we don't need the VSAA anymore," Aboitiz said.

PEMC administers and acts as operator of the WESM, the country's trading floor of electricity. VSAA was the brainchild of both PEMC and the Department of Energy to resolve the looming power crisis in the Visayas.

Last April, the ERC granted provisional authority to the Department of Energy to implement the proposed VSAA scheme.

Under the proposed VSAA, qualified customers willing to be disconnected from the grid, or what is known as interruptible load, and these generation companies that will be asked to run their plants during periods of shortage.

This will augment the supply of electricity for the system, will be paid for being interrupted (for the interruptible load) or for the power they will generate (for the generation companies).

ERC said the amount to be paid to them would be computed based on the offers made to the VSAA administrator, which is PEMC.

PEMC then will come out with a merit order list as to which load or plants will be prioritized in providing the service, based on which offers are cheapest.

Participation in the scheme is purely voluntary, however, interruptible load connected to distribution utilities can only participate through their respective distribution utilities.

The critical period in Visayas started in 2008 when actual required demand of 1.591 gigawatts surpassed dependable capacity of 1.590 MW.*PNA

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