PUD discussing how to increase power rates

If you live in Grant County and power your home with Grant PUD electricity, you pay below the utility’s cost to produce it, and discussions are underway now on how to gradually increase rates to get back on track toward “target goal posts” after a four-year hiatus.

Grant PUD commissioners told an audience in their packed boardroom Oct. 24 that their ongoing “discussion over how to set electric rates and arrive at a rate increase for 2024 will take into account all the county’s economic sectors and ensure ‘core customers’ are protected,” a PUD release said.

Residential, irrigation, small and medium business, and large commercial businesses are considered core customers and billed below cost. Industrial customers pay above the cost to produce the power.

But commissioners in 2015 voted to raise rates by small amounts yearly so that by the end of this year “no customer group would pay less than 20% below its cost to serve, nor more than 15% above its cost to serve.”

Those rate adjustments have not been made for four years, and PUD staff has proposed average rate increases of 2.5 % to 3% beginning in 2024.

Commissioners now think they need to modernize that 2015 Resolution 8768 because of “strong load growth projected well into the future, a costly need for Grant PUD to build new service center and headquarters buildings and develop new sources of carbon-free electricity generation to meet customer demand.”

They don’t agree on just how to do that, but they encourage active audience participation while they discuss it, a PUD release stated.