As New Mexico’s Legislature, Gov., and PRC push forward to implement New Mexico’s “Green New Deal” Energy Transition Act, a new report from SaveOnEnergy.com shows that New Mexico electricity users saw a 10.1% increase in electricity rates over the past year. That is the 2nd-biggest increase among US states and seems inevitably tied to the State’s looming transition to “renewables.”
At this link you can see more data (such as that New Mexico’s 13.8 cents/kWh rate is the highest among its neighbors.
Is the 10.1% increase in electricity rates a sign of things to come? Will we soon join California with rates hovering near 20 cents/kWh (not to mention poor reliability)? We certainly believe it is possible.
At least in the part of New Mexico that is served by El Paso Electric I know that the reason for the much higher electric bills is the 10 times higher fuel and purchased power adjustment charge for this year versus last year which makes your total bill go up by about 20%! This reflects the volatile price of electric energy based on supply and demand. Very hot summers throughout the west have increased electricity demand and thus made supply very costly.
Yeah, that increase certainly could drive part of the increase. El Paso has lots of nuclear and natural gas. Those are both pretty cheap, but it sounds like they’ve seen some big increases in costs. We’ll see. I don’t think the real price hikes will happen until the coal plant shuts down.
El Paso Electric and other utilities have to buy their peak summer demand electricity on the open market they dont have nearly enough generation capacity on their own. That is what the fuel and purchased power adjustment charge is all about. This summer that purchased power became very very expensive because of supply and demand dynamics. The bill surcharges due to renewables have been minimal so far. Remember that these are regulated utilities and all of their rates, including renewables surcharges, have to go through a stringent justification process. The one exception is these purchased power charges which are unregulated and are whatever the market will bear. This summer, these charges were 10 times higher than last year with the record heat in the west creating record electricity demand hence the much larger overall bills.