2% charge on energy bills aimed at regularisation

• Urban and municipal councils have not settled electricity bills with CEB
• No additional burden on consumers

The proposal to introduce a 2% charge on electricity bills to cover the cost of street lighting is merely an attempt to regularise and transparently formalise the existing practice of passing this cost on to electricity consumers, the Ministry of Energy has clarified.

Speaking to The Sunday Morning Business, Ministry of Energy Secretary Prof. Udayanga Hemapala stated that the proposal by the Government, much discussed recently, was merely an effort to formally regularise the aforementioned practice. 

He further explained that although in theory the cost of street lighting should be borne by the respective local authorities, in practice many Local Government bodies had avoided settling their electricity bills. As a result, the losses incurred by the Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) are ultimately recovered from electricity consumers during biannual tariff revisions.

“According to the law, the cost of street lighting is supposed to be borne by the respective urban and municipal councils. But to date, these councils have not settled their electricity bills with the CEB. What happens right now is that the CEB sends the electricity bills, but none of the urban and municipal councils are settling their payments.

“When these councils don’t settle the payments, we are left with no option but to treat them as a non-performing loan and absorb them as a loss to the CEB. These losses amount to around 2% of the total losses suffered by the CEB. The losses are then recovered from the consumer through tariff revisions made every six months by the Public Utilities Commission of Sri Lanka (PUCSL),” he stated.

Accordingly, Prof. Hemapala revealed that the proposal was to impose a 2% charge on electricity consumers to cover the cost of street lighting. 

He maintained that this would not introduce any additional burden on consumers, as they were already effectively paying this charge through tariff revisions. The proposal, he said, was merely an effort to regularise and transparently implement a practice that was already in effect.

The Energy Ministry Secretary further clarified that contrary to speculation, this charge would not vary based on the geographic location of electricity consumers, but would instead be a blanket 2% charge applied uniformly across the board.

“This will basically be an additional 2% charge on all our bills to cover the costs of street lighting,” he stated.

Source: The morning