Calgary looks to make changes to high electric local access fee
Posted Sep 13, 2023 9:10 am.
Last Updated Sep 13, 2023 9:17 am.
Electricity bills have been the cause of many sleepless nights for some Calgarians lately, and city council is looking to ease the pain.
It’s looking at possible changes to the Local Access Fees, which power users pay on their monthly bill.
That line on a Calgary power bill is higher than anywhere else in the province.
In other Alberta towns and cities, the fee is a flat rate — in Calgary, it rises and falls with the price of power itself.
One group campaigning for the change, is the Calgary Chamber of Commerce, who says it’s hurting businesses.
“About 63 per cent of the local access fee that’s been collected has been on businesses, and obviously there’s fewer businesses than people and so we’re really seeing a disproportionate impact on local businesses both between this fee and on property taxes as well,” says the chamber’s director of policy Ruhee Ismail-Teja. “So they’re getting hit quite hard.”
The city is expecting more than $200 million in revenue this year from the fee alone.
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On average, residents are paying upwards of $300 dollars a year, just for the local access fee.
For some business, it’s thousands and thousands of dollars — even $100,000 in some cases.
Patrick McMahon with Energuy, a group focused on energy efficiency in the province, expects more people to look at ways at reducing their bills as a result of surging prices.
“Saskatchewan had an electricity price increase of 12 per cent and Alberta was 128 per cent,” he said. “So it’s a bit of an acute issue here in Alberta.”
And, spending money on new, more efficient appliances, unplugging them all together and shutting off lights when leaving a room, hasn’t been enough to help cut costs.
“Your appliances may be electric saving devices, but the energy savings between those appliances often is not — certainly in this current environment — is not enough to make up for the increase in commodity cost, the cost of a kilowatt hour,” McMahon said.
He added that solar is proving to be a reliable way in which some people have been cutting down their costs.
“There is a great Made-in-Alberta solution — and really conservative Alberta values — energy independence economic rate of return, that is what solar provides to Alberta homeowners right now, if they’re so interested,” McMahon added.
A timeline for when council could agree to changes is uncertain.
