I called Bill Levis because he heads the state’s Office of Consumer Counsel and is the first line of defense for utility customers. Surely he would sympathize with complaints regarding Xcel’s new tiered pricing policy for electricity that was imposed at the request of regulators.
Plenty of those customers are upset, I told him, and have been contacting me in droves since a column of mine slammed the design of the “inverted block” rates.
These customers do not seem to be energy-guzzling owners of McMansions who want to keep the central air on 2 4/7. To the contrary. They are people, to cite actual examples, who “work from home, so there is little I can do to save expenses by turning off my computers”; or “had central air-conditioning installed . . . due to my battle with multiple sclerosis”; or live “in a downtown Denver building where we don’t even have the option of natural gas . . . as a result, our entire home environment is served by electricity”; or depend on home medical equipment because of “heart surgery and asthma”; or rely on “private wells powered by electric pumps”; or whose seven-member household is stuck with an electric range and a very busy washer and dryer.
What unites these readers — and others who wrote me — is surprise that they would be targeted for higher bills because their usage tops 500 kilowatt hours a month (average use is 687) and the conviction that there’s nothing much they can do to significantly reduce it.
“We recognize that this is not a perfect system,” Levis told me, and that “there are some people who will be impacted differently than others.” Yet Levis supports a tiered system with the second price point starting at the relatively low threshold of 500 kwh and pushed for it at the Public Utilities Commission.
In fact, his office wanted the second-tier charge to be higher.
“People should be aware of the energy choices they make,” Levis says. They need to understand, he added, that there are times of day when Xcel has to crank up additional power plants to meet peak demand — and that peak demand is more expensive than off-peak electricity use. That’s why his office favors moving eventually to “time-of-day” metering, in which higher rates apply to actual peak hours rather than to consumption above an arbitrary threshold.
Actually, tiered rates should have started with peak metering.
As matters stand, however, his office has no idea how many of the 60 percent of Xcel customers who exceed 500 kwh consume power consistently throughout the day and how many use power mainly during peak hours. No doubt that’s why its website doesn’t mention peak demand in its explanation of tiered rates. Instead, it encourages “customers who need to have electrically powered medical equipment operating nearly every hour of every day . . . to become aware that use of certain electrical appliances (air conditioners, electric stoves, and electric clothes dryers) can dramatically impact your monthly electricity consumption. By limiting your use of these three appliances, it can help to keep your monthly electricity bill low.”
Isn’t there something sad about a consumer office suggesting that debilitated Coloradans — many of them elderly — curtail the use of clothes dryers and stoves? Levis rejected my interpretation of that passage, but what else can it mean? Are we really to the point where turning on a clothes dryer is considered a discretionary use of electricity that should be frowned upon by right-thinking Americans?
Say it isn’t so, Xcel and Public Utilities Commission.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
