report, and saw that the biggest energy companies in the Philippines are Manila Electric Co. with P266 billion gross revenue in 2020 , followed by the National Grid Corp. of the Philippines with P49.25B . But for this piece, I focus on gencos. I will tackle the distribution utilities like Meralco, retail electricity suppliers, and NGCP in a future column.
One notable trend is the big net income in 2020 of two SMC companies despite a decline in gross revenues and the COVID-19 lockdown. The same for two First Gen companies. The Ayala power company saw a big net income in 2020. These may be windfall income from high and expensive feed-in tariff as these two conglomerates have big wind farms that are FIT-recipients.
All these reports except #4 are related. In his Opinion piece, Romy observed that, “Indonesia supplies over 95% of the Philippine’s coal imports. Coal-based plants, which comprise 44% of the power sector’s dependable capacity in 2020 and close to 60% of power generation, rely mainly on Indonesian coal… the closest alternative, Australian coal, costs more because of the higher quality, and is not even a perfect substitute, i.e., the plants were not designed to run on it.