Power rates 36% above level of a year ago
Regulated rate falls slightly from January
Epcor customers without contracts will pay slightly less for power this month than in January, the cityowned utility said Wednesday, but rates remain far higher than a year ago.
The “regulated rate option,” paid by all Epcor customers not on a fixedprice contract, will fall to 13.95 cents per kilowatt hour for residential and commercial customers in Edmonton, down from 15.11 cents in January.
Residential and commercial rates charged by Epcor are 36 per cent higher than they were last February. The average price for 2012 so far is 76 per cent higher than in the same period last year.
“There could be hundreds of factors that push the price back and forth,” said Epcor spokesman Tim le Riche, such as fluctuating consumption patterns or seasonal variation. “It’s kind of the same as a stock market.”
Le Riche suggested January’s cold weather and unexpected generation
Alberta has an absolutely voracious demand for power. People out there take power for granted.
Tim le Riche, Epcor spokesman
outages such as the weeks-long shutdown of the Genesee-3 plant north of Edmonton in November and December last year as reasons for higher prices in 2012.
Epcor buys power up to 45 days in advance of setting its regulated rate each month.
It then confers with consumer groups and the Alberta Utilities Commission to set the rate. From December 2009 until this month, the average regulated rate is 8.54 cents per kilowatt hour.
Contract power providers, such as Milner Power Inc. and Just Energy, charge fixed rates, generally ranging from 8.85 to 11 cents per kilowatt hour. Others, such as Spark and Mountain View Power, charge the flow-through price, which can change hourly with grid demand, plus about one cent per kilowatt hour extra.
Le Riche said simple household conservation efforts will best keep residential power bills down.
“Alberta has an absolutely voracious demand for power. People out there take power for granted,” he said. “People have multiple TVS, some of them have big-screen TVS, people sometimes have two fridges. They have all kinds of electronic entertainment devices and electronic devices like docks for powering up smartphones. Those things can still suck power even if the phone isn’t in them.
Several other major companies that already own a big chunk of Facebook, including Microsoft Corp., Goldman Sachs and Russia’s Digital Sky Technologies, also stand to rake in a substantial windfall from the IPO.
On Wall Street, everyone wants to know who will score the coveted “lead left” role on Facebook’s IPO. On Wednesday, it was revealed that Morgan Stanley had secured headliner status, with Goldman Sachs, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Barclays Capital and JP Morgan playing the role of support act book runners.
According to the San Jose Mercury News, in what some experts are calling an example of the so-called Facebook Effect, the economic windfall generated by Facebook’s 3,000 or so employees suddenly cashing in on the company’s IPO is expected to pump as much as $1.5 billion into California’s beleaguered economy.
According to Techcrunch, shares of Facebook were recently trading around $35.50 on private markets, giving the company a valuation of about $84 billion.