The Manila Electric Co. (Meralco) on Monday warned of higher electricity charges in June as a consequence of adjustments in several line items in the monthly power bill.
Joe Zaldarriaga, Meralco vice president and head of corporate communications, said the generation, transmission and feed-in-tariff allowance (FIT-All) charges have all increased.
FIT-All is borne by electricity consumers to pay the premium for renewable energy projects receiving incentives from the government. The rate is adjusted each year.
“This is expected to be driven by the settlement cost in the reserve market and increase in FIT-All that will be reflected in the bills of customers this month,” Zaldarriaga said.
The Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) recently ordered the partial lifting of the suspension on settlement amounts in the power reserve market that allowed the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) to recover trading costs in the reserve market last March.
The NGCP had said this likely meant an increase of more than P0.10 per kilowatt hour (kWh) on the ancillary services component of the transmission charge in June.
Meralco said the ERC also recently approved the new FIT-All starting this month, resulting to an increase of P0.0474 per kWh.
Zaldarriaga also cited pressure for the generation charge to increase given the tight supply conditions in the Luzon grid.
“We’ve experienced a series of red and yellow alerts in the last supply month, and as we know, these conditions affect the generation cost, particularly the Wholesale Electricity Spot Market (WESM),” Zaldarriaga said.
He said the weak peso, which has an impact on the costs of Independent Power Producers and their Power Supply Agreements (PSA) is similarly expected to contribute to higher generation charges in June.
In May, Meralco rates increased by P0.46 per kWh following a steep increase of almost one peso per kWh in April attributed to the generation charge resulting from higher WESM charges.
In a separate development, the Luzon Grid was again placed under yellow alert as of 8 a.m. Monday as 22 power plants were on either forced outage or de-rated, resulting in the loss of 2,692.8 MW of power.
Yellow alert was raised over the Luzon Grid from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. and from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. as 16 power plant units were down and six more were on derated capacity.
According to the NGCP, the available capacity in the Luzon grid total only 14,457 MW against a peak demand of 13,484 MW.
