The Independent Electricity Market Operator of the Philippines, Inc. (IEMOP), operator of the Wholesale Electricity Spot Market (WESM), is asking provisional approval from the Energy Regulatory Commission to recover from consumers additional market fees of P1 billion for the IEMOP Electricity Market Management System (IEMMS).
IEMOP said in a filing with the ERC the market transaction fees would cover the cost of the IEMMS project for 2025 to 2027 which is urgently needed by the WESM.
The amount will be imposed in addition to the prevailing market fee rate at the time of the commission’s approval, it said.
The agency said the current market management system (MMS), an infrastructure composed of hardware, software and associated interfaces that support the operations of the WESM, reached its useful life of almost nine years and has shown signs of performance degradation, having been commissioned in 2015.
“Moreover, the current MMS is increasingly constrained by technological obsolescence because its hardware and software components, which form the backbone of market operations, are now approaching or have reached their end-of-support period,” IEMOP said.
It said frequent software glitches demonstrate software instability has caused market interventions and disruptions in market operations, while performance degradation limited the system’s capacity to process the growing volume of market transactions, particularly with increased renewable energy and battery energy storage systems integration.
It said the advanced age of the infrastructure inhibits maximum performance and requires costly workarounds and temporary fixes that are unsustainable in the long term.
The current MMS is also incompatible with new technologies that are required to be adopted to implement market enhancements and regulatory compliance requirements, it said.