THE Manila Electric Company (Meralco) on Wednesday announced that customers in their franchise areas can expect higher electricity bills in the first month of 2024.
Meralco said there will be an upward adjustment of P0.0846 per kilowatt hour (kWh) this month, which will bring the overall rate to P11.3430 per kWh from P11.2584 in December 2023.
It said that for residential customers consuming 200 kWh, the adjustment is equivalent to a minimal increase of around P17 in their total electricity bill.
The distribution utility attributed the increase to higher power costs from the Wholesale Electricity Spot Market (WESM), which went up by P0.5611 per kWh due to higher average capacity on outage in the Luzon grid, and from Independent Power Producers (IPP), which increased by P0.1384 per kWh because of higher fuel costs of First Gas amid the use of imported liquefied natural gas.
The WESM and the IPP supply 36.5 and 20.5 percent of Meralco’s power requirement.
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