Net metering in the Philippines: how it works, who qualifies and what it changes

Net metering lets a house with solar panels send its surplus into the utility’s lines and get a credit on the bill for it. The programme has run since 2013 under rules the Energy Regulatory Commission wrote, and those rules changed in 2019, 2024, 2025 and again in 2026. Most of what a search turns up describes an earlier version.

This page is the current version, with the source and date beside each rule. The forms themselves come from whichever utility bills you, and what each utility around Pampanga publishes is a page of its own.

What net metering is

The Department of Energy’s primer puts it in one paragraph. A customer of a distribution utility installs a renewable energy system of up to 100 kilowatts on their own premises and uses the electricity it makes. Anything the house is not using at that moment goes out through the meter into the utility’s system, and the utility credits it against the bill. The DOE calls such a customer a prosumer, because they both produce and consume.

Two meters matter. Most houses have a meter that counts in one direction only. Net metering needs a bi-directional meter, which records what comes in from the grid and what goes out to it as two separate figures. Meralco’s FAQ is blunt about what happens without one: a one-way meter can record your exported solar as imported power and raise the bill. How to read a meter that counts both ways shows where the two readings sit.

Who is eligible

The national conditions are short. You are a customer of a distribution utility or an electric cooperative, your account is in good credit standing, and the system is up to 100 kilowatts, which for solar Meralco reads as 100 kilowatts-peak. Meralco’s own list adds that the account must be registered in the applicant’s name and carry no unsettled bill when you apply. A cooperative may word its conditions differently, and the only way to know is to ask the one whose name is on your statement.

Nothing in the rules requires you to own the roof, but the account and the agreement are in the applicant’s name, so a tenant needs the account holder on side. Since August 2025 a credit balance can follow the property to a new owner, with a conforme letter from the old one.

How the application runs

The order is the same everywhere, because the rules set it: the system is designed and installed, the local government inspects it, the utility checks that its lines can take it, the agreement is signed, the meter is changed, and the system is switched on to export. What differs is the paperwork each utility asks for along the way. Meralco publishes its list, and since the 2025 Amended Rules every utility is required to.

What Meralco asks for, read 1 October 2026

The application form

Downloaded from the utility’s net metering page.

Certificate of Final Electrical Inspection

From your local government, after the installation has been inspected.

A signed Net-Metering Agreement

The contract between you and the utility.

Certificate of Compliance

From the Energy Regulatory Commission, for a system that exports.

An application fee

Set by the utility and printed on its own list.

Two items depend on your installation. If you choose not to fit a renewable energy certificate meter, which the 2025 rules made optional, Meralco asks for a notarised affidavit and waiver and estimates your generation by the ERC’s method instead. If your existing meter cannot read in both directions, it is replaced with a bi-directional one and the difference in meter cost is charged, under a cap the ERC set in an advisory of 22 September 2025.

The distribution impact study

Before it connects you, the utility checks whether the local lines and the transformer that feeds your street can take what you will export. Meralco calls this a distribution impact study and says it looks for power quality problems, safety risks and system limits, and whether anything has to be upgraded first. The 2025 rules now require utilities to publish how much capacity each transformer has left, every quarter, which is the figure that study turns on.

If a cooperative bills you

The programme is national and the cooperative has to run it, but several around Pampanga publish nothing about it, so the first step is a visit or a call to their office rather than a download. The requirements page records what SFELAPCO, Angeles Electric, PELCO II and PELCO III each publish, which in two cases is nothing.

How long it takes

Since April 2026 the utility has ten working days from a complete application and the local government three, and an application nobody acts on in time is deemed approved. That is Joint Memorandum Circular 001 of 2026, from the Department of Energy, the Department of the Interior and Local Government and the Department of Public Works and Highways. The period it replaced was twenty working days.

Three things sit outside those clocks. The clocks start when the paperwork is complete, so a missing document resets them. The local inspection has to be scheduled and passed. And the meter change is a utility visit of its own. Nobody publishes a figure for the whole job from signing to switching on, and this page will not invent one.

The circular is emergency legislation. It stays in force for the duration of the State of National Energy Emergency declared under Executive Order 110 of 2026, unless the DOE revokes it sooner. Reported by BusinessMirror on 2 April 2026.

What it means for a household day to day

While the sun is up, the house runs on the panels first and the surplus goes out. After dark, everything comes from the grid. The bill then shows what you imported, what you exported, and a credit for the export. The credit is the utility’s blended generation cost, which is one of several lines on a Philippine bill: transmission, distribution, system loss, subsidies and taxes are the others, and the credit does not cover them.

That one fact decides how to live with the system. A kilowatt-hour you use yourself in daylight displaces the whole rate. A kilowatt-hour you export earns the generation line and you buy the night’s power back at the whole rate. So the washing machine, the water pump and the aircon are cheaper to run at noon than at nine in the evening, and a system sized to what the house uses in daylight does the most for its size. Credits you do not use in a month now carry forward.

One more thing changes nothing: a brownout. A grid-tied system is required to disconnect when the line is dead, with or without net metering, so the lights go out with the street unless there is a battery and a backed-up circuit. Why that is, and which arrangement keeps the lights on.

Sizing a system that exports

With net metering the surplus is credited, so a system can be sized to the whole bill rather than to daylight use alone. The solar panel calculator does both sums from your monthly kilowatt-hours and shows the formula it used. A home installation that applies for net metering is part of our residential solar installation.

Paying for it is a separate question. GSIS members can borrow toward a home installation under the GSEL, and the application needs the installer’s quotation: the GSIS solar loan, its terms and who qualifies, with a dated note on where SSS stands.