A two-tiered time of use (TOU) rates may be offered by Mindanao utility firm Cagayan Electric Power & Light Company (CEPALCO) to its customers, as hinged on the tariff approval granted by the Energy Regulatory Commission.

In its ruling, the regulator emphasized that the “availment of said TOU rates shall be on a voluntary basis on the part of the customers.”

CEPALCO propounded that “a customer who opts to shift as TOU customer cannot revert back to a non-TOU status.”

But the ERC stressed that “a customer who opts to shift as a TOU customer should not be precluded from reverting back to a non-TOU status subject to the conditions set forth in the said Resolution.”

For the approved TOU rates, the ERC has classified CEPALCO’s customers into those belonging to Rate Schedules 57-67 (now under RS 76-96) or those which are directly-connected; and those that are under Rate Schedules 17-47 (now RS 16-66), or those customers of whose rates are computed based on National Power Corporation’s time-of-use generation rate plus NPC adjustments and the average rate from other generation sources.

For customers under Schedule 76, the shift to TOU will benefit them with an average reduction of P0.0876 per kilowatt hour (kWh) to P2.4769 per kWh average from the non-TOU tariff of P2.5646 per kWh. This will include directly-connected customers LKKS Milling; Nestle Philippines; Cagayan Corn Products; Resins Inc.; Del Monte Philippines Inc.; Cagayan Oil Mill and Pilipinas Kao, Inc.
For the other customer segment, availment of TOU rate will translate to P0.0325 per kWh reduction to P2.6461 from P2.6786 per kWh. The residual non-TOU customers, though, will experience a very slight tariff hike of P0.0032 per kWh to P2.6818 per kWh.

“Customers under Schedules 57-67 who opt to be billed with the TOU rates will have an average decrease of P0.0876 per kWh in their generation rates while the non-TOU customers under Schedules 17-47 will have an average increase of P0.0032 per kWh,” the ERC indicated.

In the TOU tariff computation, the ERC pointed out that rates from CEPALCO’s contract with Minergy and its 1.0-megawatt photovoltaic (PV) plant have been excluded for customers under Schedules 17-47.