All these talk about Meralco and the high cost of electricity has made me wonder what the average Filipino household’s power bill looks like.
To make the comparison fair, why don’t we divide our electricity bill with the number of persons living in the house, including babies. I think the little darlings consume a bigger amount of electricity compared with the average person (need for airconditioning etc.)
For April, I paid P805.88 per person.
How does that compare with yours?
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Meralco shares went into a nosedive today after news of a possible investigation (good luck with making it look like a friendly Q&A) by Congress into how Meralco runs the show. If there’s anyone in the audience who doesn’t know that this is politically driven, raise your hand.
No hands?
If this entire hullabaloo actually brings down my electricity bill, goodie. But here’s a So What Chocnut snippet that people should not miss.
Exactly 20% of that electricity bill goes to Meralco. If you look at your bill, you will see the biggest portion is called generation charge, which goes to the independent power producers and the National Power Corp.
Yes, that means the government.
That simply means the power to bring down electricity rates is in the government’s hands. And that should make you wonder what the administration is trying to do. This early, the business community is already worried. Of course they are not buying the we-want-to-drive-down-electricity-costs-for-poor-Filipinos line. Former central bank governor and AIG’s standard bearer Joey Cuisia has already been interviewed on television saying, “After Meralco, who next?” Not good for business confidence.
May 9th, 2008 at 2:08 pm
Either you are naive or ignorant of the whole issue or more like sip-sip to the opposition. We can see that the philippines has one of the highest power rates in asia. Also, meralcos rates are higer than in Cebu where i resided many years back. Cebu has no natural energy sources, all are coal fired and mostly bunker/diesel fuel, yet meralco has a higher cost. its because they have dubious ways of padding their profit in all other ares of the meralco bill, more so in systems losses. Who is to say that it is the real figure for system loss? Why do provincial sources of energy such as VECO, CEBECO, cooperatives have smaller system loss? Why does meralco buy their enrgy during highest spot pricing? Why dont they open their books? what about meter deposits? These things are hard to answer because dinaya nila ang consumers for so long.Kaya if zI were you, r4ead more, an=d do not ape the opposition who have blinders in their eyes and are a rercipe for deisater if you listen to them
May 9th, 2008 at 2:02 pm
I also live ina 3 br condo… but our power bill is about P3000+ total or 1,500 per person. It even went down in April, which is odd..
I thought that was cheap! Mali pala hehe
May 9th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
last march - P192/head
april - P249/head
we are 10 adults with 3 toddlers.
May 9th, 2008 at 11:54 am
in our old apartment, our bill used to be around 700-1000 only with very minimal aircon use (about 10 hrs max a month).
but we moved and our new apartment may be better than the last but there is no window in our room. hence, no ventilation. my darlings (esp the almost-3 yr old) begs me to turn on the aircon when he goes to sleep at night. So at about 3 hrs usage/night of the aircon, the electric bill has gone up to 1500/month. Not too bad, come to think of it, when there are 7 of us at home…
May 9th, 2008 at 11:45 am
Hey we’re so cheap our bill is 500/person!
Here’s my conspiracy theory. Garcia is a corporate raider. He just wants somebody to buy his shares at high price. By annoying the Lopezes he thinks he can force them to buy him out and earn huge profit. Or option 2, buy out the Lopezes and sell the combined government and Lopez shares to a third party (MVP? Danding?). Or option 3, gain control of Meralco board and sell his shares to a third party at high price because it comes with management control.
In all cases, Garcia makes money. Remember he made a lot of money by intimidating Henry Sy to buy him out at high price in Equitable-PCI. Can he also intimidate the Lopezes?