Questions about OPALCO rates | Letter
Published 12:47 pm Tuesday, April 14, 2015
OPALCO’s board of directors has voted to implement a new rate structure that has never been tried before. They plan to increase the cost of electrical service by over 40 percent in the next four years. And they are almost exclusively doing this with a fixed flat rate that we will all pay. Whether you believe that this enormous increase in cost is warranted or not (see Chuenchom Greacen’s articles in the islandssounder.org); you should be concerned about how this increase is distributed among the membership. Using a flat fee that all members pay (regardless of how much power they consume) is not fair. The cost of “facilities” should not be equally born among all members any more than we should all pay the same electric bill. How would you feel if you had to pay the same electrical bill as your neighbor who was using four times as much power as you were? Would you be outraged? Well this (despite all the smoke that OPALCO’s new public relations engine may be throwing up) this is exactly what you will be asked to do with the new “facilities charge.” This charge will be same for you and your neighbor that might be using four times the “facilities” that you are. No matter how they try to spin this, this is the truth. The cost of “facilities” is very real but it certainly should not be apportioned equally to everyone regardless of what burden they may be placing on the facilities, yet OPALCO will begin charging you the same as your neighbor that requires four times the “facilities” that your house might. This is a very real issue and used to be addressed by charging people who used more power. We will now be placing all the increased costs in the new OPALCO budget on everyone without any regard to how much they consume, how much conservation they employ or how much peak electrical strain they place on the system.
One simple way to properly apportion the increased costs of facilities would be to actually charge for the facilities, just like we used to charge for how much power we actually used. Makes sense, doesn’t it?
Initially there is one very simple way to do this and that would be to charge according to the “Main Breaker” size in the home. Some homes have 100 amp main breakers, others have 200 amp or 400 amp. A home with a 100 amp breaker places a peak burden on the system that is a quarter of that for a home with a 400 amp breaker. This is the exact “facilities infrastructure” that OPALCO wishes to charge for. When a home has a 100 amp breaker it only requires OPALCO to have 100 amps plus a safety margin worth of facilities to support it. The 400 amp home requires four times as much. This would be a very fair way to apportion the cost of facilities. This is how it is done in much of Europe. It is a tested and proven means to actually charge for “facilities’. It is at least far, far fairer than charging you for your neighbor’s facility usage.
John Mottl
Orcas
