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Saturday, June 14, 2025

Protecting power purchasers

We raise hopes the House of Representatives will listen to Rep. Dan Fernandez of the lone district of Santa Rosa City to exercise its oversight powers to look into the mandate of the Energy Regulatory Commission.

For quick appreciation, under Section 43 of the Electric Power Industry Reform Act or EPIRA, signed in June 2001, the ERC is tasked to promote competition, encourage market development, ensure customer choice and penalize abuse of market power in the electricity industry.

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With Filipinos still suffering from high electricity rates, Rep. Fernandez, during Monday’s privilege hour, called for the chamber to exercise its oversight powers and look into the Energy Regulatory Commission mandate.

He referred to Section 23 of Republic Act 9136 or the EPIRA of 2001, which created the ERC and directs distribution utilities to supply electricity “in the least cost manner.”

There are three power loads that utilities can “blend” depending on consumers’ electricity usage per hour, namely: 1) baseload, the cheapest type, 2) peaking, the most expensive yet responsive to changes in demand, and 3) mid-merit, which could fill in the gap.

But the 56-year-old optometrist said the ERC was not following the recommended mixture of 79 percent, 10 percent, and 11 percent, respectively, adding the ERC had not yet adjusted its weighted average cost of capital or WACC since 2009, contributing to high electricity rates.

He urged his colleagues to help amend EPIRA and address these concerns – it looks like his call is not falling on deaf ears in the chamber.

Earlier on, Senior Deputy Minority Leader and Northern Samar Rep. Paul Ruiz Daza said that in 2019, he was personally promised that the ERC would act on a petition that would reduce the brownouts in Region 8, but the agency did not do anything about it.

Meanwhile, Special Committee on Nuclear Energy and Pangasinan Rep. Mark Cojuangco agreed with Fernandez on the need to revisit the EPIRA and amend its provisions, and proposed to look at the intrinsic capability of a technology that would provide cheap electricity.

The EPIRA despite, Fernandez articulated consumers’ overtly disregarded complaints over “high cost of electricity” which is an unnecessary daily freight Filipinos have to bear, wondering aloud if the Energy Regulatory Commission had done its regulating function in the past 13 years, as its current method of computation was – read this well – still based on 2009 rates.

He stressed the need to amend the EPIRA Law, especially provisions regarding the blending and mixture of power generation, and the computation of the rate of return.

In an earlier resolution proposing a review, Senator JV Ejercito said the EPIRA failed to protect consumers from the sudden increase of power generation charge and to lower electricity rates.

Many consumers have been hit by the continuing high cost of power – with the argument that the increased rates are caused by external forces beyond domestic control like the war in Ukraine.

Then, as now, there is a need to revisit the EPIRA, for legislators to look into and craft specific amendments, given the pugnaciously noxious high power rates mercilessly strangling household purchasers or consumers.

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