ERC issues new rules on plant outages

MANILA, Philippines — The Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) has issued new rules on plant outages to ensure ample supply in the grid and accountability among players in the power industry.

The  “Rules for the Interim Reliability Performance Indices and Equivalent Outage Days Per Year of Generating Units,” specify the planned and unplanned outage allowances in days per year.

According to the ERC,  the rules aim to ensure reliability, security, and affordability of the supply of electric power while it promotes accountability of the gencos, the system operator (SO) and the transmission network provider (TNP) for greater economic efficiency.

The rules also seek to set a reliability performance benchmark per technology for all generating units to lessen outages and ensure predictable power supply and rate.

“The ERC, as the regulatory body of the electricity sector, needs to ensure that generating plants are well-maintained and perform within the benchmark/standard per technology for all generating units,” ERC chairperson and CEO Agnes Devanadera said.

“This will not only ensure reliable supply but will also stabilize the price of electricity due to less or non-exposure to the volatile prices in the spot market,” she said.

According to the ERC, the rules provide for an interim benchmark to gencos with conventional and non-variable renewable energy (VRE) plants that are connected to the grid, including embedded generating plants with an aggregated capacity of five megawatts (MW) and above.

Under the rules, the ERC has determined the benchmark/standard planned and unplanned outages for the different generating plant technologies.

For coal plants, pulverized coal plants are only allowed to have 27.9 days of planned outages and 16.8 days of unplanned outages while circulating fluidized bed (CFB) coal plants  15.4 days of planned and 16.9 days of unplanned shutdown.

For gas plants, combined cycle plants can go on scheduled maintenance for 12.5 days and 7.7 days of unplanned shutdown while gas turbine plants are allowed 6.5 days of planned maintenance and 22.7 days of unscheduled outage.

Diesel plants can go on planned outage for five days and unplanned outage for 22 days. Oil fired thermal plants have longer outage with 30.8 days of planned and 27.8 days of unplanned.

For renewables, the ERC cleared geothermal plants of six days of planned and 13.7 days of unplanned; hydroelectric with 23.1 days scheduled and 6.8 days of unscheduled; and biomass plants with 32.7 days planned and seven days unplanned.