In March, Portland General Electric requested a 7.4% increase but increased that request last month. Pacific Power has also requested a rate hike, of 11.9%.
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If you look back at increases starting 1/1/22, this would amount to a combined 44% increase over 12/31/21 rates.
Other than shareholder returns, wanting to build rainy day fire funds, is it data centers sucking down incredible amounts of energy? How can it be possible to justify 44% in a 4-year period? Population hasn’t grown anything approaching that or course, is usage up anything approaching that? We have hydro and we’re doing pretty well on the wind front as of 10 years ago?
Increased use of solar panels reducing consumption and increasing credits?
This is kind of why I’m a bit iffy on net metering. Yes, it increases solar adoption by making it more affordable and it is fair for the homeowner to be compensated for excess electricity given back to the electric company, but at the same time, the electric company is forced to buy back that electricity at retail rates, during a time when consumption is generally low and production is high. That’s not necessarily too fair for the electric company either.
Now, getting rid of net metering and giving the excess electricity back to the electric company for free would be outrageously unfair to the homeowner. But maybe it should be sold back at some lower percentage of retail since it is being produced during periods of the day when it really isn’t needed all that badly. 50-60% seems fair during non-peak hours. This percentage can be increased during peak hours when demand is high, and this will encourage homeowners to build energy storage infrastructure as well, which is overall a good thing for our transition away from non-renewable sources of energy. Couple this with generous subsidies for homeowners and we’ll have a nice cycle going.
And more on energy storage—it’s really hard from an engineering standpoint to build one big 10 MWh energy storage facility, but it’s comparatively easy to build a thousand 10 kWh energy storage facilities.
Ugh. This would be so much easier if we just nationalised PGE and Pacific Power.
We had the option to nationalize them years back, we voted not to. :(
Let’s start a ballot initiative. Do you live in Oregon as well?
I do! And I voted for it last time too!
There are dozens of us!
Rate increases are only for capital expenditures. So no it’s not for shareholder value. It’s for a rainy day fund. It’s tied to improving the grid.
Electrics companies are regulated and all op ex cost are expenses to the company. Cap ex dollars are used to raise rates.
You could be able to find a break down of what they want to spend the money on as part of their capital plan.
