Electricity cost to be cut by 16% |23 April 2009

Executive chairman of the Public Utilities Corporation (PUC) Philippe Morin said there will be a reduction of 25 cents per unit used from May 1.

The change does not apply to commercial users and does not affect the demand charge – based on the circuit-breaker on the consumer’s premises.

The decision is in line with the continuous effort by the government to reduce the cost of living and to improve people’s lives as much as possible during the difficulties of the economic reform programme.

The reduction follows an announcement made by President James Michel at last week’s consultative meeting at Cascade.

As an example of the price cut, Mr Morin said a typical household using 200 units a month, with a standard 30amp circuit-breaker, will pay R264 instead of R314 now, a drop of R50.

He explained that the price cut has been made possible by a slight drop in the price of fuel and also a decrease in the tax on lubricating oil that the PUC uses in its generation process.

This, he said, reduced the cost of production by R18m-R20m, which the company decided to share with its domestic consumers.

Mr Morin said around 70 million units of electricity a year are used by domestic consumers, and the profit has been spread over all the consumption at an overall 25 cents per kilowatt-hour reduction.

He also advised consumers to monitor their consumption so as to control their tariff better.