ERC reviews Meralco, ACEN motion to recover P706m

By Alena Mae S. Flores – March 17, 2024, 7:00 pm
from manilastandard.net

Manila Electric Co. and ACEN Corp. filed a motion for price adjustment with the Energy Regulatory Commission involving a P706-million change in circumstance cost recovery in their 2019 power supply agreement.ERC chairperson Monalisa Dimalanta said the parties filed a motion on March 5 subject to the review of the commission.“It’s under evaluation now,” Dimalanta said.ACEN confirmed the amount was reduced to P706 million from P2.5 billion that the Ayala energy firm previously computed.“Meralco advised us that this is how they treated the other contracts. So based on equal treatment, we are supportive. We broke it down according to sources of supply for transparency. It is a quasi-financial contract, so you can interpret it in various ways,” ACEN president Eric Francia said.Meralco proposed a staggered six-month recovery amounting to P0.04 per kilowatt-hour to implement the P706 million recovery.Meralco senior vice president and head of regulatory management Jose Ronald Valles earlier said the company received from ACEN CIC notices for the 110-megawatt mid-merit power supply agreement and 200-MW baseload PSA covering the period January to December 2022.Valles said ACEN calculated the CIC claims at P2.28 billion for the baseload power plant and P329.652 million for the mid-merit power plant.He said ACEN filed for CIC claims for the 2019 PSAs, citing the steep climb of coal prices in the Newcastle index caused by the Indonesian coal export ban (which continued despite the ban being lifted), exacerbated by the Russia-Ukraine conflict.