PSCo Customers Pay Much More Than the 2% Rate Cap for Renewable Energy
December 9th, 2011Public Service Company of Colorado (PSCo) has been allowed to circumvent the consumer protections that were intended to cap ratepayers’ costs for renewable energy. The result is that ratepayers are paying much more than they’ve been led to believe to fund PSCo’s renewable energy strategy.
Through a series of complex financial mechanisms, PSCo ratepayers are now paying considerably more than the 2% limit they were promised for renewable resources, according to a filing Trinchera Ranch made to the Public Utilities Commission on December 2.
Due to a lack of transparency in the system, ratepayers may believe that the costs for renewable resources are funded entirely by the 2% Renewable Energy Standard Adjustment (RESA) rider that shows up on their bills. Instead, the rider does not include costs for nearly half of the renewable resources on Public Service’s system and is based on dramatically underestimated forecasts of the costs of the renewable resources that are covered by the rider.
“Despite the clear intent of both the voters and the Legislature with respect to this so-called maximum retail rate impact cap, both the spirit of this funding limit and likely the letter of the law have been ignored,” charged Trinchera in its filing before the PUC.
You can read the filing in its entirety here.