In a fresh shock, households reeling from the hike in fuel prices will have to fork out huge sums from October in the form of fuel surcharge adjustment (FSA). A hike of Rs 500 to Rs 1,000 per month for medium slab consumers can be expected, power officials indicated. This will be the impact of the AP Electricity Regulatory Commission (APERC) allowing power utilities to collect Rs 6,000 crore from all categories of customers for the financial years 2010-11 and 2011-12.
The four distribution companies had laid a claim for Rs 8,383 crore towards FSA, which is the cost of purchasing additional fuel and power to maintain adequate supply. The regulatory commission allowed the discoms to collect Rs 6,025 crore for all quarters of the two financial years 2010-11 and 2011-12. Because of this, additional charges levied at an average of 75 paise per unit will be collected over the next two years from all categories of consumers from next month.
“Additional fuel and power purchase costs have to be passed on to the consumers as FSA on a quarterly basis as per the terms of fuel surcharge formula specified under the said regulation,” reads the commission order. On the delay in holding public hearings for the claims for financial year 2010-2011, the commission clarified, “There is no provision in the FSA regulation that the FSA claim of the discoms will be forfeited if the commission does not issue the orders within a particular period. The only time limit prescribed in the FSA regulation is regarding filing of the FSA claims by the licencees.”
The commission was also faced with the contention that the levy of short-term open access (STOA) charges by APTransco on discoms for the use of network amounts to double-charging for the same network and results in unjust enrichment of APTransco at the cost of consumers. In response, the commission has proposed to disallow the cost of STOA while computing the FSA.