The Manila Electric Co. (Meralco) expects total volume of electricity exported by its customers to net metering this year to exceed last year’s 20.3 gigawatt hours (GWh).
Electricity exported from net metering as of July was at 16.2 GWh, or 79 percent of last year’s total.
Under the net-metering program, solar power facility owners with less than 100 kilowatts peak (kWp) capacity can export their excess electricity to the grid in exchange for electricity bill credits that can be in the form of rebates.
“To date, we have 8,544 net metering customers with 50.3 megawatts peak (MWp) installed capacity, and year- on- year net metering numbers and capacity are increasing rapidly,” said Ferdinand Geluz, Meralco first vice president and chief commercial officer for customer retail services, at the Giga Summit hosted by the company in Makati City yesterday.
The company said apart from helping customers manage electricity, net metering allows consumers to adopt sustainable practices.
Geluz said Meralco also started offering Distributed Energy Resources (DER) solutions to customers.
DER are smaller generation units that are located on the consumer’s side of the meter and are usually in the form of roof top solar, wind generating units and battery storage.
Current DER rules allow consumption and export to the grid for RE installations greater than 100 kWp up to 1 MWp, provided that the maximum capacity to be exported must not exceed 30 percent of the nameplate capacity of a facility.
