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Salceda, chair of the House committee on ways and means, stressed that the franchise of the Manny V. Pangilinan-run power firm deserves to be extended beyond 2028 for another 25 years or until 2053. He reasoned that the company “has complied with the conditions of the franchise law…and that renewing for another 25 years is “good for power consumers and the economy in the long run.”
Meralco serves consumers in Metro Manila, Calabarzon, Pampanga, and Bulacan. It provides service to all major electric cooperatives and distribution utilities or ECDUs. Salceda says outages suffered by the average Meralco consumer totals to “mere minutes in an entire year versus days or weeks’ worth of blackouts for other neighboring ECDUs.”
Since 2011, Fernandez says, Meralco has used the WACC as basis for rate of return of investment instead of return of rate base which would have made power rates more reasonable. He claims that Meralco’s 14.97% WACC set in 2010 was no longer accurate and should just be reduced to only 9.23% to ultimately lower the electric bills of consumers.
To me, this vile provision was sugarcoated in such a way as to make it easily digestible for consumers. And this is whereI vividly remember intense lobbying against cross-ownership that the law became toothless in the end. What was passed was only the prohibition of the transmission company from owning generation and distribution assets.