Petilla wants USAID-supported entity as third party in CSP

Senatorial aspirant Carlos Jericho L. Petilla may have already been out of the Department of Energy (DOE) for several months, but he still wants his voice heard in the sector’s policymaking terrain primarily on his pet Circular on the competitive selection process (CSP) of power supply contracting for distribution utilities.

In a recent interaction with editors at the Manila Bulletin, he sounded off that his preference for a third party in the CSP will be an entity that will be under the supervision of the United States Agency for International Development.

“I want USAID to be the third party,” he stressed, apparently referring to a consultancy firm that is being underpinned by a grant or any form of support from the American multilateral agency.

It can be culled that a USAIDfunded study channeled through the University of the Philippines-School of Economics is openly promoting the CSP process on supply procurement for the restructured power sector.

For many of the industry stakeholders though, they find higher level of comfort in having a carved-out unit of the Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) as a third party in the power supply tendering process.

The CSP third party shall be entitled to a fee that shall be collected from the participating generation companies that will then subsequently be passed through to the concerned distribution utilities.

The final pass-on of the fee to the consumers and the magnitude of that cost are still unknown though in the draft guidelines jointly issued previously by the DOE and the ERC.

At this stage, it is a major guessing-game in the industry if the final implementing guidelines of the CSP will finally be out this October 27 – the prescribed decision timeframe in the DOE Circular.

An energy official has indicated that the CSP guidelines’ issuance or the lack of it will be this week’s “biggest surprise” for the electricity sector.

While there have been stalemate in the discussions – primarily on the respective positions of the DOE and ERC – it was gathered that an issuance will still be done this week either in the form of recommendation or hushed directive, but not the final guidelines yet of the proposed supply auctioning system.