Taney
County MO – Recently I noticed that some of my fellow county
citizens were complaining about their electric bills, citing large
apparent increases. I investigated this and found some potential
reasons why their bills may have jumped!
- Empire did, in fact, raise its rates recently! Back in September, “The Missouri Public Service Commission on Friday formally approved an agreement its staff and other parties had reached with The Empire District Electric Co. earlier this summer that will result in a monthly increase of $7.60 for an Empire customer using 1,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity per month.” This increase went into effect on September 14, 2016! The current rate table for Empire is shown below;
Note
that the Summer Season is the first four monthly billing
periods billed on and after June 16, while the Winter Season
will be the remaining eight monthly billing periods of the calendar
year.
- Billing by Empire is typically not for the last thirty days but rather about a half month past that point in time. Ergo, my electric bill that just arrived on the 31st of January was actually for the period December 14, 2016 to January 16, 2017. Of some interest, however, in that later part of December we incurred much warmer temperatures than normal. My readings for that period of time are shown below. Note that were were about four warmer than what the 30 year average had been! Interesting....
In
addition, the temps from January 1 to January 16, 2016 were also on
the warm side of history reading almost five degrees above what is
normal! So, one would think that my bill would be a little lower
than last year, wouldn't one?
