The Manila Electric Co. (Meralco) projects the volume of electricity exported by customers under the net metering system to exceed last year’s 20.3 gigawatt hour (GWh) haul.
Net metering allows Meralco customers to send the excess solar electricity generated by their home systems to the grid and get credited for it in the form of lower or even zero electricity bills.
Meralco is optimistic of exceeding last year’s solar power exported to the grid given that net metering as of July this year already total 16.2 GWh.
Under the program, solar power owners with less than 100 kilowatt peak (kWp) consumption export their excess electricity to the grid in exchange for electricity bill credits that can be in the form of rebates.
“To date, we have 8,544 net metering customers with 50.3 megawatts peak (MWp) installed capacity, and year-on-year net metering numbers and capacity are increasing rapidly. For 2022, these customers exported 20.3 GWh and as of July this year, 16.2 GWh in energy export had been generated and projected to exceed last year’s aggregate number,” said Ferdinand Geluz, Meralco first vice president and chief commercial officer for customer retail services, said.
He said that apart from helping customers manage electricity, net metering also allows consumers to adopt sustainable practices.
Geluz also said Meralco has started offering so-called distributed energy resources (DER) solutions to its customers.
DER are small generation units located on the consumer’s side of the meter and usually in the form of a rooftop solar, wind generating unit and battery storage.
Meralco said that DER rules allow consumption and export to the grid for RE installations greater than 100 kWp up to 1 MWp, provided the maximum capacity exported does not exceed 30 percent of the nameplate capacity of a facility.
