Firm gets license to operate retail power-supply business
October 13, 2016
from Business Mirror
The Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) has granted Corenergy Inc. a retail electricity supplier (RES) license, after it complied with the technical, financial and administrative requirements, proving the company’s capability to operate and sustain its retail-supply business.
“We welcome Corenergy Inc. to the retail-supply business. Its presence will provide consumers with more choices of electricity suppliers,” ERC Chairman Jose Vicente B. Salazar said on Thursday.
Corenergy is owned by Vivant Energy Corp. (VEC), a subsidiary of Vivant Corp. Its primary purpose is to buy, source and obtain electricity from generating companies or from the wholesale electricity spot market (WESM) to sell, broker, market or aggregate electricity to the end-users in the contestable market.
VEC will assist Corenergy to develop it into a viable RES by guiding the company in power-supply contracting and energy trading. With the said technical knowledge transfer, the latter gets assurance that the necessary experience will be acquired to operate and manage the retail-electricity business.
It plans to sell an initial capacity of 100 megawatt in the first year, which would account for 2.35-percent market share of the total contestable customer demand.
In order to guarantee its obligations to its customers, it will be contracting 50 percent of the requirement from coal and hydrogenerator facilities. For its peaking requirement, it will be sourcing out from bunker technology. It also plans to source a portion of its energy requirement from the WESM to take advantage of the relatively cheap annual weighted-average cost of electricity.
Last, to mitigate the impact of the sudden spike of prices in the WESM due to unplanned outages of power plants, Corenergy will also contract with a peaking plant that will act as a hedge against any sharp increase of prices in the WESM.
