Courtesy: NGCP
APPROXIMATELY P70 billion will have to be refunded by the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines to consumers for various instances of overcharging of its services as power grid operator.
Santa Rosa City Rep. Dan Fernandez said that during the scheduled congressional hearing on its operations, NGCP will not only be asked to explain the reasons behind the recent outages that paralyzed Panay Island at the outset of the new year.
He said NGCP, the country’s power grid operator that is partially owned by Chinese corporations, must present to concerned Lower House committees a plausible justification as to why it should not be tasked to return over P70 billion it pocketed by overcharging Filipinos for its services in years.
Fernandez, vice chairperson of the House Committee on Energy, also lauded the call of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to conduct a regulatory reset that is expected to expose unwarranted fees paid to NGCP. He aired the optimism that a reset will result in reduction of electricity cost.
The senior administration lawmaker also welcomed the resumption of the congressional inquiry into the massive power outages that recently hit Panay Island.
Last year, Fernandez filed House Resolution No. 934 calling for a congressional inquiry into the prolonged power outage in Panay, Guimaras and Negros Islands on April 28, 2023.
Local officials whose localities were adversely affected by the outage blamed the NGCP for the incident.
Fernandez revealed that the current management of the Energy Regulatory Commission under Chairperson Monalisa Dimalanta has already ascertained that NGCP over-collected P35 billion during the term of her predecessor, Chairperson Agnes Devanadera.
“Devanadera set NGCP’s maximum allowable revenue (MAR) at P43.7 billion per year without conducting the required regulatory reset,” noted Fernandez.
As it turned out, Dimalanta had determined a lower MAR for the years 2016 to 2020.
Fernandez said that this time the ERC found that NGCP should have been granted only a P36.7 billion in MAR for each year from 2016-2020.
“For five years, from 2016 to 2020, ERC allowed NGCP to get more than it actually deserved. That’s a total of P35 billion overcharge cost imposed on our poor consumers,” lamented Fernandez.
The veteran solon is optimistic that another P35 billion will have to be refunded by the NGCP to consumers in connection with the disallowance of various operational expenditures the firm collected.
The ERC rejected items such as advertising, corporate social responsibility program allocations and donations among the expenditures that NGCP is entitled to refund as parts of the cost of its operations.
