The increase in the electricity rates within the Meralco franchise area this month will not be fully implemented in the electricity bills.
Supposedly, there would be a P 1.0779 per kilowatt-hour (kWh) for February.
However, Meralco said the full increase will be staggered to lessen the impact to the consumers.
The power distributor said that they would announce the final increase in rates within the week.
“We still have no numbers as to what we will actually implement,” Meralco spokesperson Joe Zaldarriaga said.
The supposed increase was due to the normalization of electricity prices from the suppliers following the decrease in rates last December 2017 and January 2018, the weakening of Peso versus US Dollar and the added tax in transmission charge following the effect of the new tax reform law.
Under the P1.08 per kWh increase, there was a recorded increase of P0.8469 in generation charge and a P0.1906 per kWh increase in taxes.
The generation charge was brought by the normalization of capacity fees following the annual reconciliation of outage allowances, Meralco head of utility economics Lawrence Fernandez said.