While preparing for Christmas season, don’t forget to watch and monitor your electricity consumption because you might be shocked with your electric bill early next year.

Due to 25-day maintenance shutdown of Malampaya Natural Gas, that fuels the 1,200 MW Ilijan, 500 MW San Lorenzo, and 1000 MW Santa Rita Power Plants, that started on November 22, expect a higher electric bill for the month of December.

As of yesterday, the price of electricity in the spot market ranged from Php 8.50 per kWh (off-peak) to Php 12.0 per kwh (peak), more than thrice of the Load Weighted Average Price (LWAP) of around Php 3.00 per kwh in the previous weeks. If this condition will continue until the Malampaya become online on Mid-December, and since MERALCO sourced 50 percent of its demand in the spot market (Manila Bulletin, August 5, 2006), the effect of around 200% increase of price of electricity to generation charge in the MERALCO bill is around 25%. Therefore, there could be an at least 50% increase in the generation charge in your electric bill for the month of December. This could be equivalent to around Php 6.60 per Kwh of generation charge alone, and not yet considering other charges in your bill, and VAT, that is also dependent on the price of electricity.

For non-MERALCO consumers in Luzon, the increase in the generation charge might be higher than of MERALCO consumers because those distribution utilities that serve these non-MERALCO consumers don’t have its own IPP and sourced 100% of its demand from the spot market or WESM.

Due to the shutdown of natural gas powered power plants, NPC has to run its costly oil fueled power plants to keep the supply of power at stable level.

I think we have to save electricity this Christmas season.

«Previous article in Electricity Market: Investigation of PSALM and NPC’ s Alleged Manipulation of Electricity Prices

»Next article in Electricity Market: Technical Reason Why Price of Electricity in WESM is High at High Demand Periods