The Coastal Conservation League sent the following Santee Cooper rate hikes notice to its members. Santee Cooper has stated that residential customers will experience an 8.7% rate increase, but in its analysis, the S.C. Office of Regulatory Staff determined that some customers could see a whopping 36% increase in their average bills throughout the year! In some months, particularly in the winter, it could be even higher. That’s because Santee Cooper is proposing a radical restructuring of the way your bill will be calculated, which many customers will find difficult to understand and rearrange their lifestyles to fit.
Santee Cooper
The utility wants to impose a mandatory demand charge, which would make up a large portion of your bill and be based on your highest hour of usage each month during peak demand hours. That means that even if you did a great job conserving energy all month, your bill could go through the roof because of one hour of relatively high usage.
For example, if you have family over for the Fourth of July after a visit to the beach, take showers, throw some wet towels in the washer and dryer, let the air conditioning run, cook dinner, and do the dishes, that day alone could stick you with a $170 demand charge on top of your also higher $20 fixed customer charge and all your $/kWh energy charges for the month.
This rate hike is the first following a rate freeze that was negotiated in a 2020 settlement related to the failed V.C. Summer nuclear expansion, but it won’t be the last. After this proposed base rate increase, Santee Cooper is also planning to update its fuel cost rate adjustment, which could increase bills by an additional 7%.
In addition, it will implement another increase to recover certain deferred costs specified in the aforementioned settlement. And it doesn’t end there! With a massive 10-year capital investment plan underway and billions of dollars in additional investments identified in its integrated resource plan, these increases are only the tip of the iceberg.