With the recent announcement of a huge hike in National Grid rates, local power companies feel it is a good time to remind ratepayers about the benefits of smaller municipalities.
National Grid revealed in September that its electricity customers across the state could be facing a steep increase in their winter bills, as much as 64%.
“In total, the monthly bill of a typical residential electric customer using 600 kWh (kilowatt-hours) will increase from $179 in the winter 2021-2022 season to approximately $293 for the winter 2022-2023 season,” National Grid stated.
Princeton Municipal Light Department General Manager Sean McKeon said he was “not surprised” to hear the news about the rise in National Grid rates.
“With the gas pipeline capacity issues in New England combined with our domestic LNG (liquified natural gas) supply being shipped to Europe, electric generation is going to be extremely expensive this winter,” McKeon said. “The supply portion of National Grid’s bill is a passthrough to the customer, so there is no benefit for National Grid to enter into long term supply contracts to stabilize this portion of their rate, leaving their customers fully exposed to the spike in the energy market.”
PMLD is an independent power company, like other towns in the district and region including Ashburnham, Boylston, Holden, Paxton, Shrewsbury, Sterling, Templeton and West Boylston. All are Central Massachusetts municipal light departments with rates lower than National Grid.
“We’ve had many customers call us concerned we were going to increase our rates, similar to National Grid,” McKeon shared. “Fortunately, we were able to tell them we have no need to raise our rates at this time and have no plans to raise them in 2023.”
He went on to say that because municipal light departments “are ‘owned’ by the towns they serve,” it keeps them “focused on providing safe, reliable, and affordable power.” In addition, most municipal light department employees live locally themselves, and as such, can respond quickly to power outages and service calls.
“Municipal light departments also hedge the majority of their power supply years in advance and have rate stabilization funds to ride through spikes in the energy market,” McKeon said. “This keeps cost under control and allows all of the Massachusetts municipal light departments to offer rates lower than the investor- owned utilities.”
He said that like the other municipal light departments in the area, PMLD “is focused on our customers and our community” and will continue to be so.
“We take great pride in our reliability, our forward thinking on energy supply, and our efforts to meet or exceed the state’s renewable energy standards in advance of the deadlines.”
