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SALT LAKE CITY — The state's largest electric utility is reducing how much it wants to raise customer rates. Rocky Mountain Power has decreased the amount of its January rate-hike request to the Utah Public Service Commission from $232.4 million down to about $185 million.
If fully approved, the average household electricity bill could increase approximately $8.50 per month.
Lower cost projections have prompted the utility to decrease its initial request from 13.7 percent to about 11 percent, said RMP spokesman Dave Eskelsen.
He also said that current plans for power delivery in the Rocky Mountain region will likely require the utility to ask for a rate hike "about every year" to ensure it is able to meet growing demand.
"That's been our experience the last three years in Utah," he said. "We expect that to continue as long as we need to keep building new power plants, new transmission lines and managing the (existing) system."
Eskelsen said maintaining neighborhood distribution equipment and improving environmental controls to ensure safe and reliable electric service are also key priorities.
While rate increases are not especially popular with customers, the company is doing all it can to ensure the requests are fair and reasonable, said external communications manager Maria O'Mara.
The past two increases were each 2.2 percent, with the most recent general rate hike taking effect in January. The previous hike was last year.
Despite the proposed rate increase, the Beehive State still pays less for electricity than most of its neighboring states.
Among eight states that make up the Mountain Region, Utah paid the second lowest residential electricity rates at 8.51 cents per kilowatt-hour as of October 2010. Only Idaho had a lower residential rate at 8.02 cents per kilowatt-hour — also the lowest in the nation — while Nevada paid the highest regional residential rates at 12.18 cents per kilowatt-hour.
The region is made up of Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming.
The region residential average was 10.44 cents compared to the national residential average of 11.93 cents. Utah was among the lowest in each of the five rate-usage sectors in the region: residential, commercial, industrial, transportation and overall.
Utah also boasts some of the most diverse and relatively abundant natural resources in the nation.
Approximately 82 percent of the electricity produced in Utah in 2008 was from coal-fired generation, while natural gas accounted for the second-largest proportion at 15.6 percent, followed by hydroelectric at 1.4 percent, with geothermal and petroleum each comprising less than 1 percent of net generation of electricity statewide. Other sources — such as solar and wind energy — make up an even smaller proportion of the total energy portfolio.
Eskelsen noted that as more emphasis is put on renewable power generation and reducing environmental impact, the cost of energy will increase accordingly.
"What we're building and what we're doing now costs a lot more that what we did 15 to 20 years ago," he explained. "As the economy recovers, we expect that kind of building to continue for the foreseeable future."
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