Manila Electric Co., the biggest retailer of electricity, asked the Energy Regulatory Commission to approve a request to implement its emergency capital expenditure program for 2020 amounting to around P15 billion.
Meralco said it filed the application for projects under regulatory year 2020 covering the period July 1, 2019 to June 30, 2020.
“Meralco’s very urgent RY 2020 capital expenditure application is intended to avert the foreseen emergency situations. Primarily, these capex projects are necessary to ensure the reliable operation of its distribution network and continuous distribution service and connection to meet the growing needs of its more than sixc million customers,” it said.
“Meralco’s very urgent RY 2020 capex progrma is geared towards providing reliable service to its customers by maintaining an adequate, safe, efficient and viable distribution network, while providing the needed capacity to address the forecasted load growth within its franchise area,” Meralco said.
It said capex was used to maintain and not to degrade network performance and customer performance.
“The distribution infrastructure must be sufficient to meet Meralco’s current and immediate requirements. Meralco forecasts its customer base to expand to 7 million and peak demand to grow to 7,750 MW by RY 2020,” it said.
The company said the increase in demand and customer base would require it to increase the capacity of the electric distribution system in order to continue accommodating customer connections, while maintaining the reliability and power quality of its distribution system.
Meralco added part of the capex would also be used to fund its automation and technology projects under its automated metering infrastructure, regulatory requirements for open access, spot market metering and support for government Build, Build, Build program.
The capex program includes 21 urgent major projects lined up for next year, such as the expansion of the prepaid retail electric service and meter data collection system (P879.52 million), development of Arca South substation (P596.6 million) and relocation of facilities affected by the government’s Public-Private Partnership project (P475.54 million).