ERC penalizes First Gen unit on reporting violations

By Alena Mae S. Flores – June 24, 2023, 10:16 am
from manilastandard.net

The Energy Regulatory Commission said it is actively pursuing the issuance of fines against reporting rules violations.

First Gen said in a disclosure to the stock exchange Friday the ERC imposed an administrative penalty amounting to P200,000 on subsidiary FGP Corp. for an incident of non-reporting via short message service of the occurrence of an unplanned outage event.

It also involved another incident of non-reporting via SMS of the resumption of operations following the unplanned outage.

The ERC said it was in violation of ERC Resolution No. 4, Series of 2015 which adopts the procedure in the reporting by generation companies of outage events affecting generating facilities.  The fine is payable on or before June 30, 2023.

First Gen said both incidents occurred on April 3, 2019, when a yellow alert status in the Luzon Grid was declared by the National Grid Corp. of the Philippines. FGP Corp.’s 500-megawatt San Lorenzo Combined Cycle Gas Turbine Power Plant went on a forced outage that time.

The company said FGP was reviewing its options.

The ERC also slapped a fine against Sem-Calaca Power Corp., a subsidiary of Semirara Mining and Power Corp. early this month.

The case pertains to the failure to comply with the submission of outage occurrence and resumption of operation reports through SMS within the prescribed timeline for unplanned outages on Feb. 12, 2019 and April 27, 2019, and resumption of operation on March 16, 2019, and May 5, 2019, respectively.

The regulator ordered SCPC to pay P400,000 as penalty.