ERC prepares to establish electric meters' standards

The Energy Regulatory Commission recently announced that it has been working to come up with standards for electric meters that would follow international criteria.

ERC commissioner Jose Reyes, in a public hearing in Cebu lately, said that there will be standards soon for watt-hour meters for distribution utilities, which would be subjected to calibration under ERC supervision.

"Not all meters are accurate," Reyes said in emphasizing the need for such standards among meters for distribution utilities.

He said that the meters installed in households have been factory-tested, retested and sealed already by the ERC for accuracy in taking power consumption but then there are no standards in accurate metering system for distribution utilities to follow yet.

Meanwhile on the case between the Visayan Electric Company and the Cebu Private Power Corporation, a cause-oriented group argued that VECO should not burden the consumers over the costs it spent to avert the impending shutdown of CPPC in the past.

Freedom from Debt Coalition, a policy advocacy coalition and a party to the VECO-CPPC case, contended that it was CPPC that reneged and defaulted its contract with VECO by threatening to close its operations last year.

The recovery therefore of the costs that VECO spent to avert the shutdown should "not be against the consumers," said Michael Enriquez, president of FDC-Cebu.

The ERC recently approved VECO's application for the recovery of over P243 million in advance cost it paid CPPC. The power firm said the passing of the cost to consumers does not mean penalizing them but only a way of recovering the actual cost of power.

"At the end of the day, the consumers are the ones using the power," a VECO official said.

Enriquez argued however that CPPC "electricity price", under the 1997 contract, showed that the total price per kilowatt-hour that VECO buys from the supplier shall not exceed 98 percent of the effective National Power Corporation billing rate to VECO.

The same contract also provided that Napocor would be the "sole reference for the electricity price," said Enriquez, as he contended that it did not turned out as such.

"The present CPPC rate at P6.3966 per kWh is 182 percent higher than the average rate of all sources at P3.5056 per kWh", he said. There might even be an over-recovery in this case, he added.

VECO's petition to recover the cost it advanced to CPPC takes the nature of stranded contract costs, as provided for in Section 33 of the Electric Power Industry Reform Act, said FDC-Cebu.

FDC-Cebu described the prevailing condition as showing "a preference on CPPC over other independent power producers supplying VECO, even if the CPPC output power may be sourced from other sources similar to the recently inked contract of VECO with PNOC-EDC." - Wenna A. Berondo