‘Luzon power peak demand breaches pre-Covid level’

BY LENIE LECTURA – MARCH 31, 2022
from Business Mirror

Luzon’s peak demand for power hit 11,617 megawatts (MW) last March 23, surpassing the pre-pandemic level of 11,307MW in June 2019 and last year’s peak at 11,601MW in June, the Independent Electricity Market Operator of the Philippines (IEMOP) reported Thursday.

The operator of the Wholesale Electricity Spot Market (WESM) observed an increasing trend in demand, mainly attributable to the imposition of Alert Level 1 in Metro Manila last March 1, which was later on followed by the implementation of a less restrictive alert level status in other provinces that took effect last March 16.

“So far, the peak demand of the year was recorded on March 23 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,” IEMOP said.

As for Visayas, peak demand in March this year stood at 2,143 MW which also breached the pre-pandemic levels.

However, the increasing demand was accompanied by sufficient supply levels which amounted to around 13,546 MW or 5.41 percent greater than that of February. This is mostly due to the resumption of operations by the power generators that were on outage earlier.

Despite the increase in supply, the average margin decreased by 4.04 percent which, in turn, led to a higher average WESM price of P6.97 per kWh in March compared to February’s P6.19/kwh due to increasing demand.