₱85 of every ₱100 on your bill is reachable. ₱12 is the floor.

The illustrative commercial bill, line by line

This is an illustrative breakdown of a commercial GP-LV Meralco bill in May 2026. Every line is a real charge you pay every month — the percentages vary by site (demand factor, consumption volume, voltage class) but the structure is the same across all commercial accounts:

Why the floor is the floor

Of every ₱100 on your bill, approximately ₱12–15 is structural. These charges fund missionary electrification (UC-NPC-SPUG bringing power to off-grid islands), the lifeline subsidy that caps tariffs for the poorest households, stranded contract costs from utilities that signed bad PSAs in the 1990s, the feed-in-tariff support for renewable developers under RA 9513, and the VAT collected on top of all of it.

You cannot reach this portion through any technology choice at your facility. Even if you generate 100% of your kWh behind your meter and never import a single watt from the grid, your connection to the Meralco network still attracts these charges through the kVA contracted demand and the connection fee. The middle class on social media is not wrong: this portion of the bill is a cross-subsidy, set by policy, paid by the productive sector to maintain electrification of unprofitable areas. It is also genuinely necessary policy for a country with island geography and 50 million Filipinos who cannot afford retail rates. We are not selling a fix for it. We are selling a fix for the ₱85 sitting above it.

The reachable ₱85, by lever

The ₱85 of every ₱100 sitting above the floor responds to three customer-side levers — and each lever attacks a different line item:

• Self-generation cuts the generation charge. A rooftop solar array configured for zero-export displaces grid-generation kWh at the full retail value (₱14/kWh, not the ₱6/kWh BGC export rate — see our zero-export vs net-metering comparison). Every kWh you produce behind the meter is one you don't buy from Meralco.
• Demand-shaving cuts the demand charge. Behind-the-meter storage timed to your own 15-minute peak cuts your billed demand kVA by 30–50% directly. See here for how this works — almost no commercial customer in the Philippines understands how their demand charge is actually calculated.
• Electrification of thermal load cuts the kilowatt-hours themselves. If you currently run electric resistance hot water, electric proofing, electric chillers, or any other electrical heating element with COP 1.0 — replacing with a Karnot heat pump at COP 4.5 cuts the kWh by 75% directly. Same hot water, same product, one quarter of the input energy.

What this looks like on a real commercial bill

Take a generic mid-size commercial site — 50,000 kWh/month consumption, 500 kVA peak demand, GP-LV class. Monthly bill at May 2026 rates: approximately ₱700,000. By line:

• Generation, transmission, distribution, demand, system loss, VAT-on-energy = ~₱595,000 (85%) — reachable
• Universal Charges, FiT-All, cross-subsidies, VAT-on-pass-throughs = ~₱105,000 (15%) — floor

With a fully integrated Karnot install — rooftop solar zero-export + heat pump replacing thermal load + behind-the-meter storage + iSAVE controller (rolling out 2026–27) for demand shaving — the reachable portion typically reduces by 60–75%. On the ₱700K bill, that's ₱360–445K saved per month, or ₱4.3–5.3M per year, while the ₱105K floor stays where it is.

The honest sales conversation is: we shrink the reachable ₱595K to ~₱150–235K. The floor stays at ₱105K. Your post-Karnot total bill lands at ₱255–340K vs ₱700K today — roughly a 50–65% total bill reduction. That number is large enough that no-one needs to oversell it by pretending we can touch the floor too.

How a project starts

One free site survey. We pull 12 months of your Meralco bills, log your incoming supply at 1-second resolution for two weeks, and model the line-item reduction for each lever (solar, storage, heat pump, controller) against your actual measured profile. Within 14 days you receive a one-page indicative report — your specific reachable percentage, the line items that move most, the capex range for each combination, and projected payback at today's rates. No procurement triggered. The data is yours.