Consumers will enjoy lower rates this month amounting to P0.1948 per kilowatt-hour equivalent to P39 in their monthly bill despite the series of red and yellow alerts in the Luzon grid, power retailer Manila Electric Co. said Thursday.
Meralco said in a statement this marked the second consecutive month of power rate reduction. The overall electricity rates for a typical household consuming 200 kilowatt-hours decreased to P10.0918 per kWh in June from P10.2866 per kWh in May.
“This second straight month of electricity rate decrease represents a total downward adjustment of around P0.47 per kWh since May,” the country’s biggest power distributor said.
Meralco said generation charges for June went down to P5.4158 per kWh, a decrease of P0.1350 per kWh amid lower charges from the Wholesale Electricity Spot Market, the country’s trading floor of electricity.
“The generation charge decrease is primarily due to lower charges from the WESM, despite increases in the charges of independent power producers and power supply agreements,” Meralco said.
The company’s electricity purchases from WESM decreased by P0.31 per kWh despite the tightness of supply in the Luzon grid. WESM provided nine percent of Meralco’s supply needs.
Grid operator National Grid Corp. of the Philippines placed the Luzon grid on red alert twice in May, compared to seven times in April. The number of yellow alerts, however, increased to 13 instances last month from seven in April.
NGCP also placed the Luzon grid on red alert status from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. Thursday but no manual load dropping was implemented, thus sparing consumers from a blackout.
NGCP also placed the Luzon grid on yellow alert from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Thursday as power plants with a combined capacity of 900 MW went on forced outage while some power plants also operated below capacity.
Meralco said the cost of power from Meralco’s IPPs and PSAs increased by P0.0556 per kWh and P0.0717 per kWh, respectively because of the weakening of the peso against US dollar.
Dollar-denominated costs of IPPs and PSAs accounted for 97 percent and 68 percent of their charges, respectively. Meralco sourced 41 percent and 50 percent of its power requirement from its IPPs and PSAs, respectively.
Transmission charges for residential customers decreased by P0.0427 per kWh on lower ancillary service charges while taxes and other charges decreased by P0.0171 per kWh.
Meralco’s distribution, supply, and metering charges were unchanged.
Meralco said it was not earning from the pass-through charges such as the generation and transmission charges.
Meralco also announced that the 455-megawatt San Buenaventura power plant, a new power supplier of the company with power facilities located in Mauban, Quezon, started commissioning tests this month and provided two percent of total energy requirements. Alena Mae S. Flores
SBPL is a joint venture of Meralco PowerGen Corp., the power arm of Meralco in partnership with New Growth B.V., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Electricity Generating Public Company Ltd. of Thailand.
Meralco said there were also new interim PSAs this month, particularly, Therma Mobile and Millennium Energy that provided additional capacity in Luzon as an emergency supply.
