What is a Fixed Facilities Charge on My Bill?
What is a Fixed Facilities Charge?
The Access Energy Cooperative Board of Directors has approved a rate adjustment effective April 1.
The most significant change in the new rates for single phase users is in the fixed facilities charge which is increasing from $8.90 to $22.72 a month.
The fixed facilities costs are all of the cooperative’s costs that do not change, based on the amount of energy you use or the demand that your load places on the Cooperative.
There are many examples of these types of cost. One is billing. The cost of reading a meter, calculating a bill, and processing the payment does not vary based on the size of the bill. Whether you use 100 or 10,000 kilowatt-hours a month, our cost to bill you is the same.
Secondly, many of our maintenance activities are the same. When our crews respond to an outage, our costs to restore the power have little to do with the amount of energy that is used at the account. The same is true of our right of way maintenance. When we trim trees, we do it to keep everyone's lights on. These costs are all the same no matter how much energy the meter uses.
The increase in the fixed facilities charge is based on the cost of service model. Although this is a significant increase, this amount is a closer reflection of what it actually costs to have an active account on the system. If we only adjusted the current $8.90 for inflation over the last 20 years, the fixed meter charge would be over $16.00. By moving the fixed facilities charge toward our actual costs, our energy charge actually decreases from the current $0.073 per kilowatt-hour to $0.0725 per kilowatt-hour.
The increase in the fixed facilities charge will have the biggest impact on a percentage basis, on those accounts with little or no usage. In actual dollars, as a rule of thumb, if your account uses less than 1000 kilowatt-hours a month, you can expect to see an increase of about $14 a month. If you use more than that, your monthly increase will be more, based on your usage.