Pepco to Raise MD Distribution Rates
August 16, 2010
You might think this next story is like adding insult to injury, after our recent storms and a particular utility's response to the resulting outages. Hopefully it'll help everyone down the road, though.
Maryland customers of electric utility Pepco will see their distribution rates rise by 2.3% across all rate classes, resulting in $7.7 million more in revenues for the embattled utility.
For residential customers, the rate increase will be about 3.1%, which is about a 1% increase for the average Pepco bill payer. This translates to about a buck a month average increase for those in Pepco's Maryland territory, which includes much of Prince George's County, and most of Montgomery County. Pepco also serves the District of Columbia, which is not included in this hike.
Pepco had wanted about $47 million, but Maryland's Public Service Commission scaled that request way back. The commission said while it recognizes that current economic conditions are challenging, it found that a modest increase to Pepco's distribution rate was appropriate.
If your power was affected by our recent storms, and we hear horror stories about those outages all the time here at EA (we even have a few of our own), you're probably a bit miffed about the hike. And as you can imagine, people overall are ticked. From a Washington Examiner story:
"We already pay enough for subpar service," said Bobby Bloch, owner of Bobby's Crabcakes in Rockville. His business lost power for three days in the July outages and lost it again a few days later. ...
"Increase in rates is never fine with me," said Deborah Simon, owner of Waygoose Crafts in Rockville. "We have had such a huge increase in our utility rates in the last year. My power bills have almost doubled."
The distribution rate pays for the upgrades in the system, the crews to repair outages, maintaining power lines, and so on. In the same article, Pepco spokesman Clay Anderson said the increase would pay for upgrades to transformers, wires and substations. "We do understand that the outages this summer have been very, very difficult for our customers all across the Pepco region," he said. "We are continuing to strive through our operating expenses to maintain and enhance the reliability ... We ask our customers to be patient."
Keep in mind that the distribution rate in your Pepco bill is the only part of the bill that we cannot bring down for you. We do deal with the generation and transmission parts of the bill, which make up about two-thirds of your overall bill, dollar-wise.
A funny aside ... whenever I talk with a business owner or executive, property manager, or resident in the DC area about our services, a lot of them get very excited because they think that they'll never have to deal with Pepco again. They think that our services replace Pepco in the entire bill. It's more than a bit of a downer for them when they find out that, no, they'll still deal with Pepco for outages, etc.
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