I read with interest the letters to the editor from Mike Smoot and Jack Burke, as well as the concurrent press release titled, "Delaware Electric Co-Op plans rate restructuring,” both of which were published Feb. 9.
I live in the same community as Mike Smoot and Jack Burke, and several of us have sent letters to DEC with our concerns, so I won’t repeat my letter here. However, in relation to the press release, DEC never mentioned the impact on solar customers. In my case, the increase amounts to over 57%. Calculating my savings, and including the fact that I chose to finance my contract, it will take me nearly 12 years longer to break even.
Let me quote the DEC reply to my email: “… Service charges cover infrastructure and operations. Regardless of whether or not a residential member has solar, and regardless of how much energy they consume [or generate] in a month, it still costs the same amount of money for DEC to maintain service to that person. The cost to maintain the meter, transformer and wire feeding your house is no different than for a non-net-metering person. The service charge is completely nondiscriminatory in that way.
“One of the main reasons for the large jump in the service charge is material costs. The costs of equipment that we use to keep the grid operational have skyrocketed in the post-COVID years. Just to give you an example, a standard residential-grade transformer that cost around $1,500 a few years ago now runs upwards of $6,000. I understand the jump in the service charge may seem steep, but the rising material costs in the last year or two have been very extreme. Your investment into solar energy does not take away from that fact that you still are connected to the grid, which has inherent maintenance and operational costs. That is what the service charge covers … The large majority of our membership will be seeing a decrease in their electric bills. I hope this information is helpful. Feel free to give me a call if you’d like to discuss further.”
I have removed the sender’s reply information and part of the letter for brevity, but notice how the press release reports, “Members served under the general service rate will see an increase in monthly energy costs … To ensure members in other rate classes aren’t paying for infrastructure used to power general service members, supply charges are being raised … While this is fair to other members, this rate class is one of a few that will pay more under the restructured rate …”
Note that those “other customers” are mostly solar customers.
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