The art of collecting taxes
BY AMADO MACASAET
Meralco assures lower rates in Sept
The Manila Electric Co. (Meralco) has confirmed the power rate reduction for September.
In a statement over the weekend, the Meralco said that generation charge for this month is set to go down by P0.684 per kilowatt hour (kwh) to P5.4119 per kwh from P6.0962 per kwh last month.
The utility said that the rate reduction was mainly due to the lower price of electricity sold at the Whole Sale Electricity Spot Marketer and higher dispatch from its affiliate power plants.
Meralco said that power sourced from the WESM dropped by over P5 per kwh in August, which contributed to the September generation charge reduction.
The independent power producers (IPPs), as reported earlier, registered an average decline of P0.182 centavos per kwh.
The rate reductions from the WESM and the IPPs, Meralco said, helped offset the National Power Corp.’s effective rate adjustment of P1.65 per kwh following increases in its Fuel and Purchased Power Cost Adjustment (FPPCA) by P1.0857 per kwh and Forex Adjustment (FxA) by P0.1515 per kwh.
These automatic rate adjustment mechanisms, which became effective starting last March, allow the adjustment of NPC’s rates based on the actual cost of its fuel and power purchases and movements in the foreign exchange rates.
The generation charge, which is the electric bill’s biggest component, comprises about 60 percent of the customer’s average monthly power bill.
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