PGE Wants To Raise Rates
Posted on March 9, 2018 by Bob Jenks
Tags, Energy
PGE has filed a request to raise rates by $86 million. For residential customers, bills would increase by an average of 6.3 percent. The company claims the main driver of the case is new capital investments, including a new customer billing system.
PGE is requesting that residential and small business customers take on the largest share of this increase. CUB’s analysis suggests that one reason for this is that the company is misallocating costs. Costs that are designed to help provide energy or meet peak load are being labeled as distribution costs, allowing them to be assigned to residential and small business customers, rather than large commercial and industrial customers.
$2.6 million of the increase comes from 25 new Qualifying Facilities, a type of power purchase contract. Historically, these contracts are often delayed. CUB won an adjustment in Pacific Power’s power cost case last year to account for forecasted delays and believes a similar adjustment makes sense for PGE.
PGE is also asking for a change in Oregon’s policy requiring electric utilities to take on the risk of load variation due to weather. When winters and summers are mild, customers use less electricity and the company does not make as much money. PGE is proposing to change this, so they are allowed to make the same profit regardless of weather conditions. Currently, the Public Utility Commission (PUC) allows PGE to recover profits that are lost due to energy efficiency (this is called “decoupling”). When this policy was established more than 20 years ago, it was decided that the risk of weather should stay with the utility. PGE offers no good reason to overturn this policy.
There are a lot of aspects to this filing, and CUB’s review will take some time. While we have identified some pieces that concern us, we are a long way from completing our analysis and making a recommendation to the PUC. We will keep readers informed as this docket progresses.
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03/09/18 | 0 Comments | PGE Wants To Raise Rates