Urja Khabar
Kathmandu: The government has opened the national electricity transmission grid to private-sector users by introducing criteria and charges for wheeling electricity through the system.
The move, led by the Ministry of Energy, Water Resources and Irrigation (MoEWRI), is aimed at facilitating greater private-sector participation in electricity trading.
The Electricity Regulatory Commission (ERC) on Thursday announced the wheeling charges for private-sector access to the Nepal Electricity Authority (NEA)’s national transmission grid in the presence of Energy Minister Biraj Bhakta Shrestha.
ERC Chairperson Ram Prasad Dhital said the charges were determined under the newly introduced standards for calculating transmission fees.
For fiscal year 2026/27, the ERC has set the wheeling charge at Rs 413,000 per megawatt per month for medium- and long-term open access. The charge for short-term open access has been fixed at Rs 0.57 per kilowatt-hour.
Dhital said the charges would allow third parties and private-sector entities to use the national transmission system under the government’s open electricity market policy.
He said the ERC calculated the charges based on NEA’s audited financial statements for FY 2024/25 and its projected annual revenue requirements for the following two fiscal years.
Private-sector entities and other third parties exchanging electricity through transmission and distribution networks will have to pay the prescribed wheeling charges to the NEA.
The ERC is also preparing separate guidelines for determining transmission charges for radial and dedicated transmission systems that fall outside the national transmission grid.
The commission has brought the Standards for Calculating Transmission Charges of the National Transmission Grid, 2026 into effect from Thursday. The standards provide a framework for determining charges for use of the national transmission grid, as provided under Section 33 of the Guidelines on Open Access to Electricity Transmission and Distribution Systems endorsed last year.
Under the standards, the annual revenue requirement of a transmission licensee takes into account depreciation, loan interest, employee and operating expenses, transmission-service costs, return on equity, foreign exchange expenses and income tax.
The ERC said transmission charges would be determined to ensure the full and equitable recovery of the licensee’s annual revenue requirement. Depending on the circumstances, charges may be based on system capacity, such as per megawatt of installed capacity, or on the volume of electricity transmitted, such as per kilowatt-hour.
