THE Philippine Solar Power Alliance is asking the Energy Regulatory Commission to correct the payment scheme for homeowners with solar rooftop facilities exporting their excess power to the grid.
PSPA submitted its position paper to the ERC wherein the group describe the manner by which utility companies calculate the credit due to the homeowners who sell their excess power to the grid.
The group filed its comments stressing the needed correction in the payment system as the present mechanism is contrary to the spirit of the Renewable Energy Law of 2008 and its implementing rules and regulation.
PSPA president Tetchi Capellan said in a statement that under the law, “net-metering customer is only charged for his net electricity consumption and is credited for any overall contribution to the electricity grid.”
Net metering is a non-fiscal incentives given to solar rooftop owners provided in the RE Law by way of granting credits earned from electricity produced net of consumption.
“Electric power generated by an end-user may be used to offset electric energy provided by the utility company to the end-user during the applicable period. Thus, the net-metering customer is only charged or credited, as the case may be, the difference between its import energy and export energy.”
Capellan said the law, and its implementing rules and regulations as well as the ERC net-metering rules are all talking about an exchange of energy, one offsetting the other, and that the user should only be charged the difference between import and export, which is the net of the energy exchange.
The official said that for now this is not how net-metering customers are paid.
She said that instead, a lower kilowatt price for exported energy, the generation charge, is applied to calculate the credits due to the solar rooftop homeowners.