Settlement Agreement Filed in Public Service Company of Oklahoma Rate Case
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Written by Margaret V. Thomas
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Sunday, 25 December 2011 |
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Public Service Company of Oklahoma filed a settlement agreement on Friday in its current rate case at the Oklahoma Corporation Commission. If approved, there will be slight changes in how rates are spread among the various customer classes.
But PSO’s overall customer rates will remain unchanged, said the Tulsa-based utility, which is a subsidiary of Ohio-based American Electric Power.
Commercial customers will see an increase of about 0.9 percent.
Industrial customers will see rates decrease by about 2.5 percent.
Residential customers will see a 35-cent increase, or less than one-half of 1 percent, for somone who uses 1,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity a month.
The settlement was reached during negotiations with all the parties to the case, PSO said.
Although agreed to by all parties in the case, the settlement requires approval of the Corporation Commission.
The agreement will be reviewed in a Dec. 6 hearing at the OCC.
Pending approval by the commission, the new rates would go into effect no later than the first billing cycle in February.
The settlement comes about a month after the state attorney general’s office sought to slash AEP-PSO’s proposed rate hike.
The AG’s office, which acts as an advocate for the electric consumer, said the utility should only receive a $21.1 million increase, said Bill Humes, associate state attorney general. The PSO had filed a rate increase request on July 9, saying that rates were $52.4 million below annual costs for delivering power.
The PSO has been collecting $31 million of an $81 million increase granted in January 2009, Humes said.
If PSO’s request had been approved, the net increase for a residential customer using 1,000 kilowatt-hours per month would amount to $3.83 per month, or about 13 cents per day, the utility said.
The PSO has been granted three other rate hikes in the last four years. The commission awarded PSO a $9.7 million increase in November 2006, a $9.7 million increase in October 2007 and a $59.2 million increase in January 2009, along with recovery of other costs through a separate rider of about $22 million. The combined rate increase was $81 million.
The current rate case started in August 2009, when PSO filed a request for an increase in its rates, this time seeking a capital reliability rider that would raise rates by $30.27 million. A capital reliability rider allows a utility to recover costs since the last rate case.
The PSO serves more than 530,000 customers in eastern and southwestern Oklahoma. It has 4,405 megawatts of generating capacity and is the largest distributor of wind energy in the state.
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Last Updated ( Sunday, 25 December 2011 )
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Average Settlement Payment
