Today, I received our first electric bill at our new place. I expected to see a laundry list of assorted fees, of course, but the names of some made me curious. In particular, I was charged fees for the following:
- Temporary Green Power Financing
- Renewable Energy Program
- Energy Efficiency Fee
The first one, TGPF, is a "temporary charge to foster the development of new alternative energy projects in Nevada." Ok, that's nice. But let's keep going here.
REP is basically a charge to me to pay for the rebates offered to people using solar and wind power. Let's put that together with the first one. I'm paying for them to develop alternate energy projects which they then offer rebates for, but I also pay for those rebates.
Right. But wait, it gets better!
Now we have the EEF. This is a brand new fee, just started this month. The company says ": A charge to recover costs and other expenses associated with Energy Efficiency and Conservation Programs" So your energy efficiency programs can't pay for themselves.
Of course, then there is also this little thing. "The state’s electric company wants to raise power bills by as much as 5 percent for Southern Nevadans as compensation for the loss of electricity sales because customers are more power-efficient"
There we have it, folks. Be energy efficient, and pay more money! John Owens, director of "renewable green stuff" suggests that people simply conserve more to offset the increase in rates. Well, John, when everyone conserves to offset that increase, is your company just going to take it like a man, or are you going to raise rates and create more fees?
K-Bay rockfish
2 hours ago
I used to work in finance at a water and sewer utility. We had these big environmentalist campaigns to encourage people to save water, and they worked.
ReplyDeleteBut the cost of water we bought for resale to households was fixed. So when the city's overall water consumption fell, we had no choice but to jack up rates in the next year so we could hit our revenue number.
Some deal for the consumer.