The Fayetteville Public Works Commission board members voted unanimously this week to set a new surcharge on electric rates that will be lower than the current surcharge.
The new surcharge, effective Sept. 1 through August of next year, is 0.327 cents per kilowatt hour — if a home uses 1,000 kilowatt hours of electricity in a month, that’s a $3.27 addition to the customer’s bill. It replaces the current surcharge of 0.635 cents per kilowatt hour, or $6.35 for 1,000 kilowatt hours.
There was no surcharge in place prior to September of last year.
The surcharge is called a power supply adjustment. It is levied when the PWC’s cost of buying electricity wholesale from Duke Energy is higher than than the PWC anticipated. The PWC buys most of its power from Duke and resells it to its customers in and around Fayetteville. Conversely, if PWC’s wholesale purchases are less than anticipated, the PWC uses the power supply adjustment to give its customers a credit on their bills.
The power supply adjustment charge is expected to generate $6.4 million, said Jason Alban, the PWC’s director of financial planning.
Separate from this surcharge, the PWC raised its electricity prices this past May by 2%, and another 2% increase is scheduled for this coming May.
Prior to Wednesday’s vote to set the new power supply adjustment charge, the PWC held a hearing and solicited written comments to gauge public opinion on the idea. Only one person responded and spoke against the surcharge.
“Give the customers a break for 12 months,” said Steve Harper of Fayetteville, who has served on the PWC’s Community Advisory Group.
He recalled the 1964 Motown Records song by Brenda Holloway, “Every Little Bit Hurts.” Charges of $2 here and $2 there add up, he said, “and inflation is real.”
When the chief financial officer brings a proposal to add a charge to customers’ bills, he said, “I hope you all consider, certainly be concerned about those people who’s on fixed incomes — low income people.”
PWC board members Christopher Davis and Ronna Garrett responded to Harper’s comments after they voted for the new surcharge.
“This is an annual ebb and flow — we pay the bill here, an adjustment comes — so this isn’t something that we pull out of our pocket. It’s something that we’re required to respond [to]. And our response is always with the ratepayers’ bottom line at the front. The response is never a corporate response,” Davis said.
“It’s a response that’s looking to minimize, mitigate, any negative impact to our ratepayers,” he said.
Garrett said her 83-year-old mother lives on a pension that gets smaller as she gets older.
“Where I don’t look at the $2 increase, she tells me about it at the dinner table on Sunday, and let’s me know the impact,” Garrett said. “We analyze it, think about it, and it’s not just a ‘rubber stamp.’
“It is business, and there are some things out of our control. But I take it very seriously, as does the entire commissioner team,” she said.
Senior reporter Paul Woolverton can be reached at 910-261-4710 and pwoolverton@cityviewnc.com.
This story was made possible by contributions to CityView News Fund, a 501(c)(3) charitable organization committed to an informed democracy.
