Re-emergence of extreme commentary and sentiment, page-8

Let us pretend that I could run LNG in an OCGT today, and sell my output into the WESM (which I have to do, because I do not have a contract with anyone). The variable cost of LNG for such a generator, which is the basis for my dispatch offer to the market operator, is 7 to 9 cents per kWh. The WESM this year has consistently traded below 5 cents, and sometimes below 4 cents, because coal fired power plants are the marginal generators and coal is cheap. My OCGT is likely to have a dispatch rate of less than 1000 hours out of the 8760 hours of the year. Right now and for the rest of this decade, the Philippines has plenty of capacity and nobody should expect that WESM prices will go up, other than for brief periods. This is well known in the Philippines and accounts for the low-ish dispatch rates of FirstGen's San Gabriel and Avion units, 500 MW of merchant capacity running on Malampaya gas which is cheaper than LNG; plant capacity factors average less than 30%. That's a long way of saying .... it may not be the shortest.