Power cost may increase this month following the outage of power plants in June and the depreciation of the peso against the US dollar, an executive Manila Electric Co. said over the weekend.
“In the June supply month, we experienced events that placed upward pressure on generation costs. For one, Sual Unit 2 [600 megawatt] went on forced outage beginning June 14, coinciding with the absence of Sta. Rita Module 40 [250 MW], which was on scheduled maintenance,” Meralco spokesman Joe Zaldarriaga said.
The Sual coal-fired power plant is located in Pangasinan while the Sta. Rita natural gas plant is in Batangas.
Zaldarriaga said the 850-MW reduction in supply likely affected prices at the Wholesale Electricity Spot Market, the country’s trading floor of electricity.
Power rates at WESM historically go up when supply is tight.
“For another, the peso depreciated in recent days to more than P50 to the dollar versus P49.765 in May. Both factors may have pushed up generation costs that may affect the July generation charge,” Zaldarriaga said.
The Meralco official said this was only an indication of possible rates in July.
“That is just a factor. We still have to wait for the final billings from our suppliers,” he said.
Power rates went down by P1.43 per kilowatt-hour for a typical residential household to P8.17 per kWh in June from P9.60 per kWh in May.
The P1.43-per-kWh rate reduction translated into a P285 decrease in the total bill of a typical residential household consuming 200 kWh.
The June rate reflected the refund of over-recovery on pass-through charges from January 2014 to December 2016 approved by the Energy Regulatory Commission amounting to a total of P6.9 billion and lower generation charges.