By: Staff Writer
February 02, Colombo (LNW): In the wake of the power and and energy ministry’ eleticty tariff revision this month, the country’s electricity regulator Public Utilty Commission and Ceylon Electricity Board at loggerheads over the necessary data supporting the new tariff proposal.
In the proposal handed over to the PUCSL, the state-owned electricity supplier CEB stated it has analyzed all possible scenarios to approach the best estimate of expenditure and revenue based on a number of factors.
Those are existing tariffs, availability of coal/oil fuel stocks, future fuel prices, hydro inflow variations, scheduled plant outages, envisioned economic crisis resulting in the reduction of energy demand and sales, adjusted expenses of transmission and distribution, various policy instructions of government to derive the Bulk Supply Tariff (BST) and end-user tariff proposal.
Based on CEB’s analysis, a surplus of Rs. 23,730.9 million is estimated. The CEB says the surplus can be used for the reduction of average tariff by 3.34%.
But the PUSCL contradicts CEB claims pointing out that the state-owned electricity supplier has presented their energy cost details with excess expenditure of Rs 200 billion not the above Rs 23.7bilion. Therefore the electricity tariff could be reduced by 25-30 percent by removing the bogus expenditure figure.
CEB has completely dropped the profit of Rs 48 billion gained last year ints current tariff revision proposal data submission but it has inficated transmission cost as Rs 95 billion and it has added additional expenditure of Rs.200 billion to cover up the total net profit, PUCSL revealed.
However the CEB says the new tariff proposal has been prepared considering a relief to low-income vulnerable groups and the entities of economically important businesses based on policy instructions of MOPE (Ministry of Power & Energy).
Meanwhile the Sectoral Oversight Committee on National Economic and Physical Plans raised concerns regarding the indifferent approach of officials of the PUCSL to digitalize the system.
The Committee questioned why the PUCSL and the Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) is falling behind in working towards digitalizing the system when the Parliament has requested for a dispatch audit and accurate data.
The Committee was of the view that human intervention should be minimized when and the inaction to carry out directives given by Parliament is a disrespect to the Parliament.
The Committee also expressed displeasure in the lack of action in digitalizing emphasizing that such inaction exists as it challenges the existing mafia within the system.
The Committee further stated that allowing such mafia only burdens the consumer and that the PUCSL officials should stand more firmly to rectify this situation.
