OUR: J’cans can save on light bills with new rate class
Published:Saturday | February 6, 2021 | 1:16 AMRomario Scott/Gleaner Writer
The Office of Utilities Regulation (OUR) has approved a new electricity rate class which will begin to affect residential and small commercial customers as early as this month.
The Jamaica Public Service Company has been given six months to roll out the new tariff scheme, which will see customers paying different rates based on the time of day they consume electricity as opposed to the standard rate which currently applies.
Cedric Wilson, the OUR’s director of regulation, policy, monitoring and enforcement, said that most residential customers see most of their consumption happening between 6 p.m. and 10 p.m.
“Because it is most expensive to generate electricity during that period, the logical thing to do is to charge a higher rate for electricity during that period,” Wilson contended.
Off-peak hours
The OUR explained that the cost to generate electricity varies depending on the time of day and the new time-of-use scheme would reflect that.
Between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. when most residential customers and their families are sleeping is referred to as off-peak hours and generating electricity at that time is significantly cheaper.
Peak periods require a more expensive effort.
“We use the most expensive generating plants to get you over that peak. You can start them up quickly and you can shut them down quickly – that is the gas turbine – and they are very, very expensive to run. During that period, the cost of generating electricity is much more and that is why we refer to it as the peak period because demand is higher and the cost of serving that demand is disproportionately higher than it would have been in other periods,” Wilson explained.
“What is the advantage of a rate structure like this? What it does is gives people the opportunity to reassign their consumption to different periods. So, you can actually move doing things that are expensive in terms of electricity cost to a low-cost period, and in that way, if you are creative enough, you can reduce your bill,” Wilson explained.
For the regular residential customers, categorised as R10, they will be charged $8.86 per kilowatt-hour while small commercial customers, categorised as R20, will be charged $6.34 per kilowatt-hour.
Between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m., referred to as the part-peak period, R10 customers will be charged $12.61 per kilowatt-hour and R20 customers will be charged $9.09 per kilowatt-hour.
And during peak hours, R10 customers will be charged $14.49 per kilowatt-hour while R20 customers will be billed at a rate of $10.46 per kilowatt-hour.