The Philippine Electricity Market Corporation gets the open web and open foundations. And they are doing it right. We – as a private sector public – are falling down on this one.
PEMC is posting tons of data to the web regarding the Wholesale Electricity Spot Market (WESM). You can go to this page
and click through to bunches and bunches of market data regarding bids and offers and clearing prices and marginal generator units. It’s somewhat obscure to the uninformed. It’s in generally raw form. Very simplified. But it’s text format which means it’s open.
It is up to us, the public, and some enterprising individual or company to swoop in, write the code to access this data, massage it, and present it back in an easy-to-consume format. It’s a business opportunity waiting to happen!
It’s not PEMC’s obligation to do that. They are doing the right thing. We – as a public – have to get our act together and ride this EPIRA horse the way it was meant to be rode.
Any coders out there want to collaborate?
Here’s the official asset valuation study for Meralco as of June 30, 2006.
Go to page 4 and you can clearly see that the “Historical Depreciated Cost” of their assets is P48.8 billion.
And you can see that the “Optimized Depreciated Replacement Costs,” which is essentially what they are permitted to earn on – or their rate base – is about twice that value at P96.6 billion.
The first number is rooted in reality. It’s reflective of what is actually out in the field and reflects the investments they actually made but not yet compensated for through rates.
The second number is an accounting fiction. It represents not a single additional dollar spent or invested by Meralco. Nevertheless, ERC permits the utilities to earn a return on this fictitious number.
This magic process applies to all private utilities and to Transco (pardon me, NGCP). Except electric cooperatives.
Interesting. No?
I’m moving more and more of my Philippine Energy Sector discussions to here on Friendfeed.
I haven’t totally worked out how that space and this blog will relate. I may never totally work it out.