Paying for invisible losses

By Herman M. Lagon

The electricity bill rarely arrives with drama. It simply appears on the table one ordinary day. Someone opens it. A brief silence follows. Then comes the question that has become part of family life: “Why did it go up again?”

No one has an immediate answer. Instead, everyone begins searching their memories. “We hardly used the air conditioner.” “The children were careful with the lights.” “Even the rice cooker was unplugged after breakfast.”

The bill offers no explanation, so the family creates one in the only way it knows how — by adjusting. A postponed trip to the mall. A few more nights with only the electric fan. One less unnecessary expense.

None of these decisions makes headlines. Yet they happen every day in homes across the country. They remind us that for many families, budgeting is not about mastering finance. It is about quietly making room for tomorrow without letting today’s worries show. It is about stretching a salary until the next payday without letting the children feel that money has become tight. It is about making sure there is still enough left for groceries, transportation, medicines, tuition and emergencies.

That is why President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s proposal during his fifth State of the Nation Address to remove system loss charges — and even the value-added tax imposed on those charges — immediately caught people’s attention. It was not simply another economic proposal tucked between larger national issues. For many families, it felt personal. It sounded as though someone had finally acknowledged a question they had quietly carried every time the monthly electric bill arrived.

The appeal of the proposal is easy to understand because it speaks to something deeper than electricity. It speaks to fairness.

Picture yourself coming home from the market.

The rice you bought is delivered a few minutes later. The delivery boy looks apologetic. The sack tore during transport, he explains, and several kilos were lost. Then he hands you the bill — still charging you for the full sack.

It is hard not to ask, “How did that become my expense?”

You would probably understand that accidents happen. But you would also smile, scratch your head and ask, “Ngaa ako ang mabayad sang natabo sa dalan?” Why should the loss come out of my pocket?

That simple question captures how many consumers feel about system loss.

To be fair, most people understand that delivering electricity is not as simple as flipping a switch. Wires grow old. Transformers wear out. Storms damage power lines. Some people illegally tap into electrical connections. Even in the best systems, a certain amount of electricity is naturally lost as it travels from power plants to homes because of technical limitations. No reasonable consumer expects a perfect system.

What many struggle to understand is why households should continue paying for losses they neither caused nor controlled.

That is what makes this issue more than another item buried in the fine print of an electric bill.

It is the public school teacher checking quizzes late into the evening under a single fluorescent light. It is the sari-sari store owner carefully counting the day’s earnings before deciding whether there is enough to restock tomorrow. It is the fisherman finally home after hours at sea, charging his phone while his children finish their homework beside him.

Different lives. Different stories. Yet they all end up asking the same honest question: Why are we paying for electricity that never reached us?

Still, applause is the easy part. Reform is where the real work begins.

Removing system loss charges sounds straightforward until the difficult questions start surfacing. If consumers no longer shoulder those costs, who will? Can electric cooperatives absorb them without affecting the quality of service in rural communities? Will private distribution utilities simply recover the same amount through another charge on the monthly bill? Can they continue investing in stronger power lines, smarter technologies and better substations if one source of revenue disappears?

These questions do not weaken the president’s proposal. If anything, they make it even more important to get the reform right.

Because if there is one lesson many of us have learned over the years, it is that a fee removed from one corner of a bill sometimes has a way of quietly returning somewhere else under a different name. Consumers have seen it happen before and, understandably, they have become cautious.

That is why amending EPIRA should mean more than deleting a line item from the monthly statement. It should also strengthen transparency, require clear accounting of costs among power distributors, reward utilities that become more efficient and assure consumers that today’s relief will not quietly become tomorrow’s hidden charge.

Only then will families truly feel that what disappeared from the bill was not just another fee — but a burden they should never have been carrying in the first place.

***

Doc H fondly describes himself as a “student of and for life” who, like many others, aspires to a life-giving and why-driven world grounded in social justice and the pursuit of happiness. His views do not necessarily reflect those of the institutions that employ him or with which he is affiliated.