General Manager of Dominica Electricity Services Limited (DOMLEC), Bertilia McKenzie has announced that the company is in the process of filing for a tariff review.
An electricity tariff is a charge that customers are required to pay per unit of electricity consumed. Tariff review exercises are conducted to determine DOMLEC’s rate of return on their investment and ensure DOMLEC is meeting its revenue requirement (the amount of money that customers are required to pay for the cost of supplying electricity over the period).
The Independent Regulatory Commission (IRC) and DOMLEC began the tariff review exercise in April 2022. Given that the process usually takes nine months to one year, Mc Kenzie expects that this should be completed by the first quarter of next year.
Her comments were made during a press conference at the company’s headquarters in Fond Cole as she and other senior staff members briefed the media and the nation about the latest developments regarding Domlec.
She explained that “DOMLEC is in the process of filing for a tariff review.”
“No one knows at this point what the tariff will be, so what is happening now is that we are submitting to the IRC various components that will feed into the tariff…this has been going well from our standpoint,” McKenzie stated.
She also commended the staff of DOMLEC who she stated: “continue to work hard to ensure that the generation system delivers during this time of crisis”.
“DOMLEC thanks its employees, particularly those in the generation department, the ET&D department, and, all employees…we want to thank all our employees who provided support services during this time of crisis,” she remarked.
“My staff continue to work hard to ensure that our generation system delivers what it was intended to do. My staff and I are still standing by the Grace of God…DOMLEC thanks its customers for the patience they have displayed in the past months.”
Meantime, at the press conference Chief Operations Officer (COO) at DOMLEC, Dave Stamp said, in terms of load shedding, the company is not completely “out of the woods” but in a much better position today as compared to last week with the addition of the Aggreko system.
DOMLEC has entered into a rental agreement with Aggreko, a US-based generator rental firm to lease two units generating three megawatts of electricity. The units arrived on the island on Friday, November 10 and the commissioning process began on Sunday (November 26) and explained that once the units are fully commissioned Dominicans should see a significant improvement in the load management which has been going on for the past weeks now.
“We are in a much better place than we were obviously from last week by the addition of the Aggreko system,” Stamp said. “We are not where we want to be, because the statistics I gave you said we have a 3-megawatt reserve margin,” he said.
“Our largest unit in the system right now is close to that in terms of capacity. So, if that unit develops a problem, then we are back to running on the edge…we are not completely out of the woods, but we are near the edge of the woods…we are not deep in the middle of the woods as we were,” Stamp stated in response to questions from the media.
He stated “In terms of load shedding, things are getting much better to avoid it.
The available capacity including the Aggreko units is 18.5 megawatts…our projected peak load for today is about 15.5 megawatts, so we have a 3-megawatt reserve margin,” he stated.
Furthermore, he revealed that there was no load shedding yesterday, “and we are pleased about that.”
Stamp said DOMLEC is continually working to overcome the load shedding in the near term and also in the longer term.
“Today we are also not projecting load shedding, but even though we still have the load shedding projections that we sent out from last week, we kept with the advisory that it is pending, because we are still in the commissioning process,” Stamp stated.
He said the country went through the entire independence and Creole Festival season without any load shedding and immediately after that, there was the incident in Trafalgar where the pipeline was damaged.
The media was also given a tour to view the operations and the newly commissioned generators.
