Here are some tidbits I picked up by being at the public consultation this morning at ERC on the Business Separation Guidelines and Code of Conduct for Supply sector.
ERC is surveying large industrial customers (primarily of Meralco I presume) to see if they would object to being placed on a public list designating them as contestable customers. So far the response is running about 50/50 but the survey isn’t complete yet.
At issue also is whether the ERC will implement a Do Not Call List (or No Distrubance Request, as they call it) for contestible customers. It’s currenlty in the draft regulations.
A new power sector entity is being defined by the ERC – Wholesale Aggregator (WA). This entity, as I understand it, can obtain power from IPPs and resell to DUs (and DUs only – i.e. not to large industrials. DU=Distribution Utility). The [draft?] rules for ERC licensing of WAs are to be published by ERC next week. In ERC’s eyes, this will allow bilateral trading in bulk power possibly before WESM starts up. The legal authority of ERC to define such an entity was questioned and rebutted (by presideing Commissioner Butalid) this morning – not sure if it’s still at issue or not.
ERC will be issuing Rules on Confidentiality – not sure what this is going to entail but should be interesting and ultimately contentious.
ERC anticipates that new accounting rules for DU financial reporting will go into effect January 1, 2007 which require the utilities to disaggregate (horizontally separate) their books into seven different business lines (or as many of those seven that the DU is involved in).
Most troublesome statement made by Commissioner Butalid, whom I’ve come to admire:
The good thing about competition is that we don’t have to monitor anything – competitors will do that.
Hoo boy!