CUB and Parties Settle Avista Rate Case: Customers to See Rate Decrease
Posted on April 5, 2022 by Will Gehrke and Mike Goetz
Tags, Energy
CUB and other parties have reached an agreement with Avista Utilities that reduces its rates by 1.4 percent. The average residential customer’s bill will be lowered by $0.96. All parties that worked on this rate case support approval by the Public Utility Commission (PUC), which will hopefully occur in the coming weeks.
Assuming the PUC’s approval, the bill reduction will go into effect on August 22, 2022. Avista is a natural gas utility that serves parts of Southern and Eastern Oregon, including Roseburg, Medford, Klamath Falls, and La Grande. CUB believes this is a great outcome for customers.
Avista filed its general rate case in October 2021, requesting an increase of $3,774,000 for its Oregon customers, or 3.1 percent. The company claimed that its request was driven by continued gas distribution system investments. CUB and parties met several times to discuss settling the case. Eventually, parties agreed to settle on lowering Avista’s overall increase to $1.6 million.
However, based on a change to Avista’s tax accounting, the company’s rates will actually decrease. Avista changed how state and federal tax benefits related to meter investments and employee costs are received by customers. This accounting change has led to a significant amount of money going back to residential customers.
In responding to Avista’s rate request, CUB recommended allocating meter costs based on per-customer counts. Meter costs scale with the number of customers. More customers means more meters. And more meters incur more meter-related costs. Since residential customers are the largest customer class on Avista’s system, they pay the bulk of meter investment costs. CUB believes this means they should receive the bulk of meter benefits.
All parties to the case proposed different ways of allocating these tax benefits to customers. Parties ultimately agreed to adopt CUB’s rate allocation, which was a reasonable outcome, and favorable to residential customers.
CUB is proud of the outcome in this rate case. It is rare for a general rate case to result in a rate decrease. This is a considerable victory. CUB would like to thank all parties to this proceeding for meeting in good faith and ultimately agreeing to a settlement that provides benefits to Avista’s residential customers.
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04/05/22 | 0 Comments | CUB and Parties Settle Avista Rate Case: Customers to See Rate Decrease