Meralco rates down by 10.3785/kwh in Dec.

Electricity bills for customers of Manila Electric Company (Meralco) will be on downtrend this December billing month at the rate of R0.3785 per kilowatt hour.

That will then cut the overall billed rate of the utility firm to R9.2487 per kwh from last month’s R9.6272 per kwh.

For the average residential end-user within the consumption base of 200 kwh, that will redound to savings of R76, according to Meralco. The distribution firm explained that “the lower December rate was mainly due to a R0.3035 per kwh reduction in the generation charge.”

Overall, the generation charge component in the rates had declined to R4.6045 per kwh from R4.9080 per kwh, and such had been traced generally “to the peso’s appreciation and lower Wholesale Electricity Spot Market (WESM) charges.” The other cost factors triggering rate reduction had been the R0.0186 per kwh cut in the ancillary services charge of the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP); which had partly pulled down taxes and other charges by R0.0564 per kwh.

Meralco noted that “despite a slight increase in the demand for power in Luzon in November, charges from the WESM decreased by R0.4658 per kwh.”

It expounded that the power supply situation somehow improved in the last supply month, compared to the ‘distressed situation’ that the power system had suffered in October, with incidents of ‘yellow alerts’ at that time.