What will happen to this year's electric bills?
Business owners and commercial ratepayers...you might want to read this.
On Tuesday this week the PUC released their examiner’s report squashing a heavily litigated stipulation agreement (approximately 15 lawyers in the room at all meetings, so not cheap) in favor of the simple solution of charging everyone a purely usage pro-rata (volumetric) charge for the Net Energy Behemoth (NEB). The NEB sum is estimated at $240 million per year for the next twenty years.
This urgency came about because of a flawed rate design in the Versant MPD territory: a small number of customers (I think, literally, 76 customers) were responsible for $8.5 million in stranded costs. If it were spread as an average, that would be $112k per customer, which on it’s face is too much for many small businesses. But it wasn’t spread in a simple average, and so we hear about wood chip mills, potato processors, and blueberry harvesters going out of business or being stretched to the max.
By removing fixed costs, and going to a pure volumetric, I can make some estimates, but also have questions.
(Spreadsheet with total kWhs derived from stipulation agreement item 278 in docket 2024-00137)
Questions:
When we look at the total kWh usage line (approx 11.3 billion kWh yearly) - does that number include electricity produced in kWh programs and consumed on site? (i.e. my mom’s residential solar array: Usage was 7051 kWh, but generation was 3796 kWh. Does that 11.3 billion number include the actual usage or just the net draw?)
For commercial customers, it has been unclear what portion of public policy NEB costs they are paying. Residential bills say it is $15 per household. The MGS-S bill says the same thing. However, the stipulation agreement indicates that MGS-S customers are currently being charged a fixed charge of $213 per month to cover NEB. This is not broken out on the bill.
So, if the NEB cost is going to be 2 cents per kWh more, and all other fixed charges are removed, here’s what it would look like:
I think the 12,000 customers in the MGS class are going to be annoyed, to put it mildly. But this is considered a more politically appealing situation, because residential users vote, and it muffles the source of increased cost goods and services.
As always: please tell me if I got the math or the logic wrong. I’m trying to figure this out real-time, in front of an audience. Good policy shouldn’t be this hard to understand, right? 🤓
