Pacific Power, PGE get state OK to raise residential rates again now for 1.5 million Oregon customers

By Alex Baumhardt, Oregon Capital Chronicle

SALEM, Ore. -- The 1.5 million Oregon households who receive electric service through Pacific Power or Portland General Electric will pay more this year.

The state’s Public Utility Commission — a three-person governor-appointed group charged with regulating the rates of privately owned electric and gas utilities in Oregon — approved both monopoly electric utilities’ requests to raise rates on residential customers at a meeting Tuesday.

PGE rates will increase by 5%, a roughly $8 per month increase for the average customer, while Pacific Power’s 4% increase equates to more than $5 per month.

The increases take effect Wednesday.

The truncated period between approving the increases and their effective date is due in part to  a new law, the FAIR Energy Act. The law bans private utilities from raising rates between Nov. 1 and March 31, so ratepayers are not hit with bigger bills in winter, when usage is highest.

The companies requested the increases due to higher fuel costs, as well as investments in grid infrastructure, wildfire mitigation and clean energy and efficiency programs, said Kandi Young, a spokesperson for the Public Utility Commission, in an email. They’ve been filing piecemeal requests to the commission for tweaks to their rates over the winter.

“That means several filings that historically would take effect at different points in the year are now aligned to take effect April 1. The timing each year depends on all of these moving parts and can vary,” explained Young.

Commission Chair Letha Tawney said in a statement that the rates reflect “the real costs of delivering power safely and reliably.”

“As fuel prices, wholesale market conditions and renewable energy costs shift, we must update rates so they accurately reflect the cost of efficiently maintaining the service customers depend on every day,” she said.

Officials with the Citizens’ Utility Board, a watchdog group established by Oregon voters in 1984 to represent the interests of utility consumers, said it’s created an unusual situation, with less time and information to review an amalgamated rate increase and to possibly petition it.

“It’s usually pretty tight on the deadline between when we know what the rate increase is and when it goes into effect, but this does seem tighter than usual. The CUB team is very frustrated with this whole situation,” Charlotte Shuff, a spokesperson for the board, wrote in an email.

It’s the sixth year in a row the commission has allowed the companies to raise rates on residential customers, and those rates today are more than 50% higher than they were just five years ago — more than twice the rate of inflation since 2020.

That’s due in large part to explosive demand for energy from a massive new industrial customer: data centers.

PGE absorbed the most data center load growth of any private utility in the state during the last decade, according to a Sightline Institute analysis of U.S. Energy Information Administration data.

As a customer class, residential users’ demand on PGE’s system has grown by about 1% a year during the last 10 years, or about 10% in the last decade. Demand from the class of industrial power customers that data centers fall into grew nearly 70% during that same period.

The Public Utility Commission at the end of April will decide whether to approve the company’s plan to comply with a new law requiring it charge tech companies for any new infrastructure needed to get power to the data centers. The citizens’ board has accused the company of attempting to skirt the law.