Spare innocent electricity consumers
The revelation of ERC indicated that SMC will go to great lengths to squeeze out from a tight financial situation of its own doing.
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Daily TribuneThe revelation of ERC indicated that SMC will go to great lengths to squeeze out from a tight financial situation of its own doing.
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The Energy Regulatory Commission gave proof of the deception that SMC Global Power had resorted to in challenging the dismissal of its petition for a P4.80 per kilowatt hour rate increase.
The SMC energy unit's argument implied that the ERC went against the computation of its own office in junking the SMC submission.
A San Miguel Corp. statement said, "the ERC-Regulatory Operations Service itself confirmed that the commission does not have any other data or information that could contradict or disprove the computations and simulations submitted by Meralco."
SMC was suggesting that the petition for rate increases was backed by the ROS computations that validated its claims but the regulator did not follow these in issuing its decision.
ERC wrote oppositors of the SMC petition to dispute the supposed similarity in the computations of the petitioners and the ROS regarding the possible scenarios after the dismissal of the appeal.
It noted that "the price impacts presented and those computed by ROS are not aligned in many ways."
The main challenger of the SMC application, the consumer coalition Power for People, said the ERC told the group to belie the claims in media reports "that the ERC's ROS sided with the motion to raise electricity rates set by 2019 power supply agreements" owned by Global Power units.
"Since the ERC's decision to deny the joint motion of SMC and Meralco, we have noted claims popping up in the media that the decision was made against the findings of the ROS," P4P Convenor Gerry Arances said.
The ERC said the petitioners used several assumptions "which are not explained, supported or justified."
"ROS, on the other hand, used data on the submissions of the petitioner as part of its monthly Uniform Reportorial Requirement for the period January to May 2022," ERC indicated.
"We noted inconsistencies in the application of assumptions across the scenarios, and this was observed to have unduly affected the rate impact simulations," the letter read.
The petitioners also used a spot market price forecast of P8.9404 per kilowatt hour that the ERC pointed out as "the basis for such forecast not having been established".
In contrast, the ROS used a P7.6659 weighted average of the Wholesale Electricity Spot Market rate based on the actual price from January to May 2022.
The revelation of ERC indicated that SMC will go to great lengths to squeeze out from a tight financial situation of its own doing.
To secure the PSAs with Meralco, it submitted very low offers despite knowing that the deal is based on straight pricing that does not allow pass-through of costs to consumers.
Realizing that its losses are piling as a result of the contract, it tried to arm-twist the ERC into approving a revision of the fixed terms in the deals.
SMC must submit to the rules and suffer the consequences of its bad business decisions without making unwary electricity users suffer.
