February 17, 2016 9:55 pm
The Department of
Energy (DOE) could investigate Manila Electric Company’s (Meralco’s) P0.42 per
kilowatthour (kWh) rate hike this month upon the filing of a complaint.
“If DOE gets a
complaint—we have to act—we’ll talk to the Energy Regulatory Commission [ERC],”
DOE Secretary Zenaida Monsada told reporters Tuesday.
However, she stressed
the Commission holds the jurisdiction for the regulation of the rates.
The DOE Secretary
explained it could only assist with the investigation from the part of the
Wholesale Electricity Spot Market (WESM), as the department serves as its
chair.
Monsada further said
mitigating measures to cap the trading prices at the WESM were already implemented.
The ERC ordered
Meralco to explain the cause of the rate hike for the January bills. It
directed the distribution utility to submit the details and bases of its
computation for all the billing charges in three days.
On February 5,
Meralco said the overall rate was mainly pushed by the generation charge, which
increased by 25 centavos per kWh to P4.17 per kWh, due to higher costs from
power supply agreements (PSAs).
The distribution
utility further bared the hike of PSAs was due to the normalized outage
allowances for January’s consumption, which allowed power plants to lower their
capacity as one unit of the Calaca and Masinloc power plants was on maintenance
shutdown.
It added the lower
charges from the Wholesale Electricity Spot Market and the Independent Power
Producers were not enough to offset the increase.
No comments:
Post a Comment