CPPA wants NEPRA to increase power tariffs by another 21 percent

CPPA wants NEPRA to increase power tariffs by another 21 percent

Islamabad (Saturday, March 10, 2012): Central Power Purchasing Agency (CPPA) is not through with the rise in electricity tariffs charge to customers. At start of March, the company requested National Electric Power Regulatory Authority
(NEPRA) to increase the tariffs by 39% on account of increasing global oil prices.

NEPRA approved CPPA’s demand for rise but now it seems that they are not satisfied with the increase and wants the regulatory authority to further augment the charges by another 21 percent.

CPPA claimed that its fuel costs for the month of October 2011 through January 2012 were far higher than those it was allowed to bill and so it must increase the tariffs in order to recover the costs it has already paid to power
generation companies.

For that purpose it had filed four separate petitions. Nepra will conduct public hearings into those four petitions on March 20. The regulator had previously declined those petitions due to stay orders issued by courts in which
Nepra was facing litigation over its decisions to allow power tariff increases.

As per CPPA, for the month of October 2011 it faced an average fuel cost of Rs6.95 per kilowatt-hour of electricity purchased but was collecting only Rs4.71 per unit in tariffs, leaving a difference of Rs2.24 per unit. During November
2011, that number came out to Rs1.30 per unit. For December 2011, the differential was Rs0.99 per unit and in January 2012 that number was Rs1.96 per unit.

For the month of March, NEPRA has already allowed an average of a 39% increase in the tariffs in order to recover the cost of fuel used by power generation companies in August 2011. A further increase of about Rs1.77 per unit,
or about 16.3% is expected in the coming month owing to fuel price differentials during the month of September 2011.

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Posted by Wajahat Javed on Mar 11 2012. Filed under Business, Pakistan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry