Napocor accredits 3 new firms for spot sales

State-run National Power Corp. (Napocor) has accredited three more big companies to bid for its one-day power sales (ODPS) program, a Napocor official said.

ODPS project manager and head of Napocor’s operations planning and protection department Alberto Guanzon identified the newly-accredited companies as Fortune Tobacco Corp., Colgate Palmolive Philippines and Intercontinental Paper Industries Inc.

Guanzon said these customers have a combined maximum allowable bid of about 27 megawatt per day.

He said three new bidders also joined the ODPS auction in the first three months of 2001. These are the Cagayan Electric Power & Light Co., Orient Semicon Electric Phils. and Noah’s Paper Mills. These new traders have a maximum allowable bid of close to 21 MW.

Under the ODPS, Napocor sells its unutilized capacity to its directly-connected customers and to the so-called "embedded" customers of private distributors through an electronic, on-line bidding system.

These customers, he said, should have a self-generation capacity of at least one megawatt to be able to join the daily bidding.

For the first quarter of 2001, Napocor reported a 38 percent increase in revenues from the ODPS scheme to P202 million from P146 million in the same period in 2000.

Guanzon attributed the increase to the brisk trading for Napocor’s unutilized capacity. As of March 25, a total of 42 industries and electric utilities were actively participating in the daily ODPS on-line bidding.

A total of 466 gigawatt-hours (gWh) were awarded to winning bidders from January to March this year, or more than double (116.74 percent) the 215 gWh traded during the first quarter of 2000. A gWh is equivalent to one million kilowatt-hours.

The average day-ahead price of the electricity sold through the ODPS during the three-month period was placed at P1.91 per kilowatt-hour.

With the first three-month revenues, cumulative revenues from the ODPS since it was first implemented in June 1998 have breached the P1 billion mark amounting to P1.28 billion as of March 25.