Electricity rate differs in summer

Since the temperature in summer is fairly high in Taiwan and the electricity usage for air conditioning is increased, Taipower uses higher cost generators to meet the increased electricity usage in summer, which leads to a rise in the cost of electricity. And the cost of electricity during non-summer months is comparatively lower. Therefore, in order to reflect the difference of the cost of electricity between summer and non-summer so as to encourage energy conservation, seasonal electricity rates have been adopted since February 1989. The summer electricity rate is applied from June to September while lower non-summer electricity rate is applied from 1st of October every year.

The electricity usage of residential and small businesses is charged every second month

Since the number of residential & small business users is huge, in order not to disturb users too much and carry out energy conservation and reduction of paper bills, Taipower has implemented the every-second-month meter reading & charging system for residential & small businesses users since July 1985. Half of the users are metering in odd months (January, March, May, July, September and November) while half of the other users are metering in even months (February, April, June, August, October and December). Meter reading of odd-month/even-month users are further divided into different meter-reading batches. The billing period of different meter-reading batches is different but is basically 61 days. After applying the every-second-month meter reading & charging system, the amount of electricity of each charging tier is doubled according to the rate schedule (For example, if a household user’s monthly usage is within 120 kwh, $1.63 is charged for per kwh; now on the basis of every-second-month meter reading & charging system, $1.63/kwh is charged for usage within 240 kwh, which applies to other usage stages as well.)

How does the electricity bill be calculated if the billing period covers different rate periods?

Users’ electricity usage may be charged with different rates when the meter-reading date is different from the starting date of seasonal rate change, or when electricity rate is adjusted in the interval of its billing period. Since the number of users of our company is more than 13,000,000, it is difficult to complete the meter-reading for all users when electricity rate is to be changed. The usage of the billing period is allocated according to ‘the ratio of days before rate change to total billing days’ and ‘the ratio of days after rate change to total billing days’, and the usage is charged according to these two ratios with different unit rate. This method has been widely used by many energy companies in other countries when electricity rate is adjusted, and has also been applied in Taiwan for many years.