June 9, 2020 | 7:50 pm
RURAL electricity cooperatives
disputed claims by the National Grid Corp. of the Philippines (NGCP) that their
charges to rural consumers account for a third of all power bills.
Over the weekend, the NGCP noted
that its transmission charges are only 4% of an electricity consumer’s bill,
while generation charges collected by power plant operators amount to 44%, and
the distribution charges make up around 33%.
Philippine Rural Electric
Cooperatives Association (Philreca) said the distribution charges of power
utilities in the countryside do not make up a third of their customers’ bills.
“There were no instances where the
distribution charge of electric cooperatives would reach 33.49% of the
effective power rate of the DU (distribution utility),” Philreca Executive
Director Janeene D. Colingan said in a statement late Monday.
Ms. Colingan said the share of
electric cooperatives’ distribution charges for every peso paid by their
customers in their bills amounts to a little over P0.10 or around 10% of the
total.
Ms. Colingan said for a cooperative
which charges its customers P9.41 per kWh, 11% of the total bill is for the
utility’s distribution services, while 16% is for transmission charges.
The NGCP report on electricity bill
components is based on a billing statement of a residential customer of a large
electricity distributor, “and is not referring to the case of the electric
cooperatives,” she said.
The pass-through components in
electricity bills, such as generation and transmission dues, which are paid for
by consumers, are not remitted to power utilities. Generation charges are for
power generators supplying electricity, while the transmission charges go to
the NGCP. — Adam J. Ang
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