By Myrna Velasco Customers of Manila Electric Company (Meralco) will be on a better place this September billing as the utility firm’s rate for residential end-users will go down by P0.1458 per kWh.   (KJ ROSALES / MANILA BULLETIN FILE PHOTO For subscribers within the 200-kilowatt hour consumption bracket, the aggregate reduction in their bills will be P29 for this billing cycle. Meralco said its rates will be reduced to the level of P10.0732 per kWh this September from the previous month’s P10.2190 per kWh. With lower power bills this month, Meralco stressed its customers “can find some relief in the decrease,” at least a reverse track from the swelling inflation rate announced by the government this week. Meralco Spokesperson Joe Zaldarriaga said “this goes against the current trend that we see in other basic goods and commodities.” On the generation charge component of the rates, this line item went down by P0.0772 per kWh to P5.2719 per kWh from last month’s P5.3491 per kWh. Meralco explained that the cost downtrend was primarily driven by the P2.0768 per kWh reduction in settlement charges of the Wholesale Electricity Spot Market. “WESM prices decreased this month as a result of both less power plant capacity on outage and lower average demand for power in Luzon,” the company said. The other bill components were similarly down, by P0.0292 per kWh on the ancillary services charge of the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP); while taxes and other charges were slashed by P0.0394 per kWh. Meralco explained that the P0.6112 per kWh decline in WESM charges had been able to offset the average P0.3287 per kWh climb on cost of procurement from its power supply agreements (PSAs) with generation companies and its contracted independent power producers. The level of the utility firm’s supply sourcing from IPPs had been at 40-percent; and for the PSA-underpinned capacity, it had been at 39-percent.