New Service-Reflective Tariff‘ll Guarantee Effective Service Delivery – IBEDC

By Solomon Odeniyi

The Ibadan Electricity Distribution Company (IBEDC) has said that the electricity new service-reflective tariff was needed to ensure improvement in infrastructure and effective service delivery.

Regional Communication Officer of IBEDC, Osun Region, Mrs Kikelomo Owoye, said the increase in the electricity tariff was in the best interest of customers.

Owoeye explained that unlike in the past, the new tariff would encourage fairness, as customers would be billed based on what they consume and availability of power in their respective areas.

She noted that the tariff would enable the company to provide more infrastructure and improve on its service delivery to its customers.

Owoeye said:  “It is a tariff approved by the Nigeria Electricity Regulatory Commission. It is a service-reflective tariff. Every customer will be charged according to what he or she consumes and the power supply in their area.

“For instance, if we have an area that enjoys 24 to 20 hours power supply, consumers of that area fall under class A, unlike before where we had R1 and R2, C1 and C2, D1 and D2 among others.

“We now have tariff class A, B, C, D and E classes and they are now into subcategories. We have the segment of non-maximum demand customers and the maximum customers fall under 1 and 2, that is, we have the MD1 and MD2, etc. Under these classes, we have A non-MD and A MD1 and 2. We also have B non-MD and B MD1 and 2. We also look at the hourly availability, that is what is used to give the unit cost to each of the classes. For A non MD, it is N62.33k that is the supply to this area is a minimum of 20 hours, for class of B that means they enjoy at least 16 hours, class of C enjoys supply between 16 and 12 hours while class of D enjoys between 12 hours and 8 hours and the E class gets from 8 to 4 hours supply.

“With all these classifications, we realize that most of the customers are expected to be metered. If you are being billed on post-paid metre, that means your multiplier will be based on where you fall into. From our end, we know the hours each feeder enjoys power and they are going to be billed based on that.

“In addition, this will encourage fairness unlike before everybody is on class R2 (residential) and the power supplied in each area differs but at the end of the day, no matter what is being used, customers have the same multiplier.

“We are also trying to see how this can translate into better service delivery and meet customers’ complaints. It is going to help us provide more infrastructure for our customers and replace the aging ones in the system. We are appealing to our customers to cooperate and understand so that we can deliver on this.”