Philippines has world's highest power rates
By romzee
@romzee (937)
Philippines
October 16, 2012 2:42am CST
TUCP Party-list Rep. Raymond Mendoza showed the Manila Electric Company (MERALCO) residential rates hit an all-time high of P13.66 per Kilowatt hour (kWh) beginning August, at a dollar equivalent of US$.33 per kWh, the highest in the world surpassing rates from Denmark, Germany, Italy, Austria,Ireland, Japan, Belgium, and Netherlands at 22 to 32 cents per kilowatt hours.
What happen to Epira law once hailed as a groundbreaking law that promised to lower power rates? Power rates since the law was passed (six years ago) has now doubled.
Hope it will not double again in the next six years!
1 person likes this
4 responses
@rsa101 (38166)
• Philippines
17 Oct 12
Harsh reality because of the uncontrolled rising of oil definitely our power would also be affected. Being solely dependent on Oil from outside since we have not found a good source for it within our country.
The only solution for this is to find alternate ways to not depend on Oil. Although we have geothermal and the dams to supplement but we are a growing nation so demand is always big for it. Naturally prices will indeed rise. How the countries manage to have their power rates lower I guess is also management ability to curb their own cost as well.
@rsa101 (38166)
• Philippines
18 Oct 12
It is hard to prove one supplier from over pricing or not most if not all suppliers will just follow the prevailing price and would just differ their prices either lower from one or higher. They can easily invoke many factors that could make the price rose higher and our government agency in charge of monitoring this is just not able to determine if the price they present is fair enough for them or not.
@romzee (937)
• Philippines
18 Oct 12
You're right my friend the cost of power will never go down but the government should be able to protect us from from energy suppliers and distributors overpricing... Their inefficiency translate to very high cost of power and with government conspiracy pass this on to us the consumer.
1 person likes this
@rog0322 (2829)
• Cagayan De Oro, Philippines
16 Oct 12
Hi,
You did not mention the cost of gasoline, I reckon it also cost more here than in other countries. Yet we have the oil deregulation law, which was designed to cut down oil price, that was five, six years ago too. Maybe, the government has nothing to do with it, if they could, something must have been done with it.
@romzee (937)
• Philippines
16 Oct 12
Cost of power, water, gasoline and almost everything keep rising because of too many taxes impose by the government. All this deregulation and privatizations which they promise will bring down prices instead leads to higher prices. There is no actual competitions going on, but instead those big companies connives to keep prices at high level.
