March 12 ------ Customers of the Manila Electric Company (Meralco) should expect higher electricity bills this month as the power distributor implements a hike in its household rate. In an advisory, Meralco announced it is adjusting its power rate by 26 centavos per kilowatt-hour (kWh) for March.
In particular, the power distributor's overall rate will go up by P0.2639 per kWh, bringing the household rate to P12.2901 per kWh from P12.0262 per kWh in February. This translates to about a P53 increase in the monthly bill of a customer consuming 200 kWh.
Meralco attributed the rate hike to the absence of the one-time downward adjustment on reset fee, equivalent to P0.2264 per kWh for Meralco customers, that was implemented in February as ordered by the Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC). “Also contributing to the upward adjustment was the P0.1294 per kWh increase in the transmission charge for residential customers, due to higher ancillary service charges incurred by the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP),” it said. “This month’s transmission charge also includes the second of three installments of February and March 2024 reserve market transactions for Luzon that ERC directed NGCP to collect,” it added.
Meralco added that March’s charges reflect the P0.0351 per kWh increase in Feed-in Tariff Allowance (FIT-All) following the ERC’s directive to implement a new FIT-All of P0.1189 per kWh beginning this March, from a previous rate of P0.0838 per kWh. Other charges that include taxes registered a net increase of P0.0416 per kWh, according to the power distributor. Meralco added that the increase in March’s rates was tempered by the lower generation charge, which went down by P0.1686 per kWh to P7.0517 from P7.2203 per kWh last month due to lower costs from Meralco’s supply sources.
Moreover, charges from Independent Power Producers (IPPs) and Power Supply Agreements (PSAs) registered decreases of P1.0143 and P0.2934 per kWh, respectively, due to the appreciation of the peso against the US dollar, which affected around 98% of IPP costs and 61% of PSA costs that were dollar-denominated. “Wholesale Electricity Spot Market (WESM) charges also went down by P0.2247 per kWh due to improved supply situation in Luzon. While average demand in the grid increased by around 329 MW, average capacity on outage was lower by about 157 MW for the February supply month,” it said.
IPPs, PSAs, and WESM accounted for 31%, 47%, and 22%, respectively, of Meralco’s total energy requirement for the period. Pass-through charges for generation and transmission are paid by Meralco to the power suppliers and the grid operator, respectively, while taxes, universal charges, and FIT-All are all remitted to the government. Meralco noted that its distribution charge has not moved since the P0.0360 per kWh reduction for a typical residential customer beginning August 2022.
Source: gmanetwork.com
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