Manila Electric Company (Meralco) reported on Tuesday higher power rates in March 2025, with residential bill rising by P0.2639 per kilowatt-hour or about P53 for customers consuming 200 kWh a month.
This brought Meralco’s overall rate for a typical household to P12.2901 per kWh this month from P12.0262 per kWh in February.
“The reason is that the one-time regulatory reset fee adjustment was completed last month, and the transmission charge and feed-in tariff allowance are also higher. These are the factors that led to the increase in the electricity rate,” Meralco vice president and head of corporate communications Joe Zaldarriaga said.
The one-time downward adjustment on reset fee, equivalent to P0.2264 per kWh for Meralco customers, was implemented in February as ordered by the Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC).
Zaldarriaga said the increase in the transmission charge for residential customers also contributed to the upward adjustment at P0.1294 per kWh due to higher ancillary service charges incurred by the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP).
He said this month’s transmission charge also included the second of three installments of February and March 2024 reserve market transactions for Luzon that ERC directed NGCP to collect.
The March power rates also reflected the P0.0351 per kWh increase in feed-in tariff allowance (FIT-All) following the ERC’s directive to implement a new FIT-All of P0.1189 per kWh from a previous rate of P0.0838 per kWh.
Other charges that include taxes registered a net increase of P0.0416 per kWh.
Zaldarriaga said the lower generation charge, which went down by P0.1686 per kWh to P7.0517 from P7.2203 per kWh last month due to lower costs from Meralco’s supply sources tempered the increase in rates.
Charges from Meralco’s independent power producers (IPPs) and power supply agreements (PSAs) registered decreases of P1.0143 and P0.2934 per kWh, respectively, due to the appreciation of the peso against the US dollar which affected around 98 percent of IPP costs and 61 percent PSA costs that were dollar-denominated.
Charges at the Wholesale Electricity Spot Market (WESM) also went down by P0.2247 per kWh due to improved supply situation in Luzon.
Meralco said that while average demand in the grid increased by around 329 MW, average capacity on outage was lower by about 157 MW for the February supply month.
Meralco sourced 31 percent, 47 percent and 22 percent of its supply requirements in February from the IPPs, PSAs, and WESM, respectively.
The company said pass-through charges for generation and transmission are paid by Meralco to the power suppliers and the grid operator, respectively; while taxes, universal charges, and FIT-All are all remitted to the government.
