Meralco has raised its generation charge for the fourth straight month and the seventh time since the start of the year (Photo from Reuters/www.daylife.com)

Sorry folks. Meralco (Manila Electric Co) “miscalculated” and had to increase our monthly bills again by 44 centavos per kilowatt-hour (kWh). (Read here) This is the fourth straight month that the giant utility has raised its generation charge and the seventh time since January. This also means that we will be paying Meralco P2.18 per kWh more this month than what we used to pay at the start of the year. If you are consuming 200 kWh a month, it means you will be paying about P236 more in your August billing than what you paid Meralco last January. The bad news is the power profiteers are just getting started.

Good news?

The good news is, according to Malacañang spokesperson Edwin Lacierda, high electricity rates are just temporary and may go down next month. No, the Aquino administration will not compel the Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) to scrap the Automatic Adjustment of Generation Rates (AGRA) that has legitimized the monthly increases in Meralco’s generation charge. Lacierda, quoting Energy Secretary Jose Rene Almendras, said that they just expect the San Jose power plant to be completely rehabilitated by September. “Hopefully next month we will have lower prices of electricity,” Lacierda said. (Read here)

I do not know which “San Jose power plant” Lacierda is referring to. But I suppose it is the San Jose substation in Bulacan, which is not a power generation plant but a 2,400 Megavolt-Ampere (MVA) transmission facility. In May, the ERC approved the rehabilitation of the San Jose substation, which serves 40 percent of Metro Manila’s power needs, and ordered the replacement of its transformers. The ERC assured then that the rehabilitation “will have no immediate impact on the price of electricity charged to consumers”. (Read here)

Anyway, Lacierda and Almendras are blatantly misleading the people. Electricity rates will remain unreasonably high and will continue to increase in the coming months and years unless Congress will repeal Republic Act (RA) 9136 or the Electric Power Industry Reform Act (Epira) of 2001. (Read here) No less than President Noynoy Aquino has assured the people of high power rates in his State of the Nation Address (Sona), in which he lambasted the Arroyo administration for allowing the National Power Corp. (Napocor) to sell electricity at a loss. But Aquino’s argument on why the state-owned power firm went broke ignored the role of privatization as I’ve pointed out in a previous post. (Read here)

Nationwide increases

The problem of exorbitant and unabated power rate hikes is not confined to Metro Manila or Meralco’s franchise area. Using the Performance Based Regulation (PBR) scheme, a rate-setting methodology for distribution utilities that was made possible under Epira (Read here), the Visayan Electric Co (Veco), for example, has recently raised its distribution charge for residential customers by 3.41 percent. (Read here) Meralco, using the PBR methodology, has also increased its distribution charge by a total of 35 percent last year, on top of its increases in generation charge. (Read here)

But the rate increases of Meralco, Veco and other distribution utilities are just a portion of the bigger increases that households nationwide will have to face soon. The Power Sector Assets and Liabilities Management (Psalm) Corp., which Epira created to undertake the privatization of Napocor’s generation assets, has asked the ERC for rate increases (all in all, about P1.86 per kWh) to recoup supposed losses arising from stranded costs (read: guaranteed profits of independent power producers) as well as fat bonuses of Psalm officials. (Read here) The Philippine Electricity Market Corp. (PEMC), which is the governance arm of the Wholesale Electricity Spot Market (WESM), another Epira creation, has filed a petition for a 74-centavo per kWh hike in the spot market’s transaction fees. (Read here) The National Grid Corp. of the Philippines (NGCP), which took over the privatized transmission facilities, again as mandated by Epira, is seeking its own rate increase of 5 centavos per kWh in Mindanao. (Read here) Finally, Napocor has pending applications for rate increases of P3.38 per kWh in Luzon and P4.71 in the Visayas to recover adjustments in generation costs and currency fluctuations. (Read here)

Imagine how much our monthly electricity bill will cost if all these applications – on top of the automatic monthly increases such as Meralco’s generation charge – were approved by the ERC.