ISLAMABAD, Aug 26: The Water and Power Development Authority has sought permission to charge a fixed amount from domestic and commercial consumers as capacity charge in addition to the normal energy charges under a two-part tariff system.

A senior Wapda official told Dawn on Tuesday that a petition to this effect has been submitted to the National Electric Power Regulatory Authority (Nepra) on behalf of eight distribution companies of Wapda.

Domestic and commercial consumers of Wapda constitute about 85 per cent of the total customers, and the present tariff for these two is designed on a unit rate basis. Wapda claimed that this system was suitable during the power shortages and loadsheddings to suppress power consumption but the situation had changed now.

The official said there would be no change in tariff for consumers with a load capacity of up to one kilowatt under the proposed petition, but a fixed amount of about Rs90 per kw for domestic and a comparatively higher rate for commercial consumers would be charged.

Consumers with less than one kilowatt capacity in commercial and domestic category are almost non-existent because minimum approved load where a fan or an iron is used would be of more than two kilowatt capacity. Lifeline consumers with monthly consumption of 50 units normally have 0.5 kilowatt sanctioned load capacity.

This means that every domestic consumer will have to pay for capacity at the rate of Rs90 per kilowatt even if the consumption is zero.

The Wapda official said that the objective of the two-part tariff system, which is a market demand-driven formula, is to give an incentive to the high income and consumption groups to use more electricity at a proportionately lower rate.

He said that tariff rate for the higher consumption group was touching Rs7 per unit and if consumption is 1,000 unit, the electricity bill simply comes to around Rs7,000 a month. After paying for the capacity, this group would be required to pay a maximum of Rs4 per unit energy cost and the monthly bill is likely to reduce to Rs5,000.

The Wapda official said the tariff would start coming down with the higher consumption level and this would lead to elimination of theft and encourage more power consumption.

He said the industrial consumers were already paying their bills under the two-part tariff. He said Wapda was paying around Rs1,000 per kilowatt capacity charges to independent power producers (IPPs) while it was charging only Rs90 per kilowatt.

He said subscribers having nominal consumption with higher capacity loads are not paying anything for the reservation of additional capacity but Wapda was paying capacity reservation costs on their behalf to IPPs.

Wapda had filed a similar petition in November 2000 to introduce the two-part tariff system but it was rejected by Nepra in June 2001 following a strong protest by various consumer groups during the course of public hearing.

When contacted, a Nepra spokesman said the regulatory authority had not yet received any petition for the two-part tariff and could comment only when a petition is admitted for regular hearing.