DisCos want capacity charges erased from invoices
Some Distribution Company (DisCo) operators have frowned at their payment of ‘capacity charges’ for investments made by Generation Companies (GenCos) in the monthly bulk energy invoices.
An investor in one of the 11 DisCos told Daily Trust that the distribution firms were made to pay for Capital Expenditure (CAPEX) of the GenCos through the monthly bills prepared by the Nigerian Bulk Electricity Trading Plc (NBET).
He said payment for capacity charge was similar to the Fixed Charges electricity customers rejected which was used for network maintenance and captured by the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) in the Multi Year Tariff Order (MYTO).
“The same NERC should remove this capacity charge component so that our monthly energy bill will become less and easier to pay. The NBET said we often paid less than 50 per cent every month but failed to tell Nigerians that the amount we were made to pay for energy had increased tremendously,” the official said.
Corroborating this, the Managing Director/CEO of Kaduna Electric, Engineer Garba Haruna, appealed to NERC and NBET to provide a level playing field for all participants in the electricity market.
DisCos’ spokesman, Abdulazeez Abdullahi, made the appeal when he received members of the House of Representatives Committee on Power in Kaduna last Saturday.
He decried the present billing arrangement where DisCos, “are forced to pay capacity charges for investment made by GenCos every month, an amount which is often higher than the cost of energy supplied.
“It is pertinent to note that the monthly bills submitted to DisCos by NBET consist of cost of energy supplied and capacity charges for capital investment made by GenCos.
“The capacity charges are often even higher than the cost of energy which we cannot transfer to the customers,” he told the lawmakers.
Earlier, Chairman of the committee, Mr. Daniel Asuquo, gave DisCos six weeks to resolve and meter all customers who had paid for meters under the wound up Credited Advance Payment for Metering Initiative (CAPMI) scheme.