By Bill Oakey, October 10, 2022

Over the weekend, the Statesman’s metro columnist, Bridget Grumet absolutely nailed the issue of Austin Energy’s surprise rate shock announcement. This blog has recommended a periodic adjustment of the fixed fuel charges on our bills. The Statesman column endorses that concept. But a future reform may not help us anytime soon.

The big question is, what can the City Council do to soften the extreme rate shock that will accompany the proposed 71% surge in the Power Supply Adjustment and the 24% increase in the Regulatory Charge? I have two ideas that may make a big difference.:

1. The City Council should consider a 25 year loan to finance the fuel cost increase. This would be similar to what San Antonio CPS did after last year’s winter storm. Their customers will pay it back monthly, with a small fee of just over a dollar per month. A loan would at least recover Austin Energy from the big financial hole that they dug themselves into, by not asking to change the Power Supply Adjustment early in the summer.

2. The City should contact Congressman Lloyd Doggett, to explore options for Federal assistance. The Inflation Reduction Act may have some provisions for helping cities and states pay for shoring up electrical grids. Any other potential Federal grants should also be explored. The City should also ask State officials about potential assistance from the State.

Here is the Statesman column on this topic:

Austin American-Statesman, October 9, 2022

Grumet: Austin Energy shouldn’t wait a year to catch up on fuel costs

One way or another, we’re going to pick up the tab.

The only question is how much of a wallop this will pack on our monthly Austin Energy bills — and whether the city-owned utility will take common-sense steps to avoid hitting customers with such wild spikes in the future.

“To have such an extreme change happen so quickly, that has got to be something we can better control,” Mayor Steve Adler told me Friday.

• A few weeks ago, Austin Energy proposed significantly raising the fuel charges and regulatory fees on our utility bills, amounting to about a $20 increase on the typical resident’s monthly bill.

More: City Council raises concerns over planned Austin Energy rate, fee hikes

It was a startling announcement, considering the City Council normally tweaks these fees once a year with little fanfare. Last year’s adjustment to the fuel charges and regulatory fees knocked a whopping 4 cents off the average resident’s monthly bill.

This year is different. Natural gas has been at its highest prices since 2008. Buying electricity has also grown more expensive, as the state has taken steps to shore up the power grid to try to prevent a repeat of the disaster we experienced in the 2021 winter freeze. These rising costs are unavoidable expenses for Austin Energy — which means they must, in some way, get passed on to us as customers.

“In May, things just seemed to explode here in ERCOT,” Austin Energy Chief Financial Officer Mark Dombroski told me, referring to the congestion on the state power grid. “We had a really hot summer; we had all the supply problems and a huge demand. I’m not sure anyone really saw … all those things coming together back when we set the (fuel charges for customers) in November of ❜21.”

OK. But here’s the maddening part. Costs have been surging for months. Utility executives could see that back in May and June. Yet it wasn’t until September that they proposed raising fees on customers to recoup those costs. By then Austin Energy needed to dig itself out of a deep financial hole — meaning a steeper price hike for all of us.

The problem is that Austin Energy adjusts its fuel charges for customers only once a year, providing an annual reckoning to catch up on whatever happened with the utility’s own fuel expenses over the past 12 months.

More: Grumet: Austin Energy proposal would raise your bill — even more if you conserve. Why?

The goal behind this policy was to keep customers’ bills stable. But in a way, this practice has the opposite effect: Waiting months to revise fees, allowing the deficits to pile up, means customers face an even bigger spike by the time the annual recalculation occurs.

Consider this analogy: Say you’re used to spending $100 a week for your groceries. But then prices jump around a bit, and some weeks it costs $2 more to get what you need. Or $5 more. Or $7 more.

Would you rather pay as you go, handing those extra bucks to the cashier as you check out? Or would you put those extra weekly charges on your credit card, where they add up to a couple of hundred bucks by the end of the year, and only then do you come up with a plan to pay off that debt over the next 12 months?

Option B is what Austin Energy is doing right now with our once-a-year fuel adjustments.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Our neighbors in San Antonio have a city-owned utility that adjusts the fuel charge on customers’ billsevery month to keep up with market conditions. Yes, that means bills fluctuate a bit from month to month. But that spares customers the kind of annual jolt facing Austinites now.

I asked Dombroski whether Austin Energy would consider adjusting the fuel charges more often. He said he’s open to the idea, but doing so would require the City Council to update its ordinances on how fuel charges are set.

Adler told me he wants to hear a couple of things when Austin Energy officials meet with the council this week.

For starters, the mayor has asked the utility to offer a different proposal instead of the roughly $20-a-month fee hike for residential customers that was designed to recoup costs within one year.

Adler said he wants to see a more gradual adjustment in fees “over a three-year period of time, in a way that doesn’t hurt our bond rating, but that provides some softening of this extreme change.”

And then the mayor wants the utility to address the question: “How do we know this isn’t going to happen again?” That will require a plan that’s more proactive than simply waiting once a year to adjust fees.

We can’t stay on a path where this kind of sticker shock happens. For one thing, the hit to residential customers under Austin Energy’s current proposal might be greater than $20 some months. Austin Affordability blogger Bill Oakey recalculated his bill for July — a sweltering month when he kept the thermostat at 80 degrees in his 1,400-square-foot home — and the proposed charges would have added $34 to that bill, for example.

Meanwhile, as my colleague Bob Sechler reported, Austin Energy’s current proposal to raise fuel charges and other fees could cost small restaurants around $455 a month extra, while department stores and small hotels could see monthly bills increase by about $1,800. Large industrial consumers could face millions of dollars in rising costs over the span of a year.

And these fees are all separate from the proposed overhaul of Austin Energy’s base rates that I’ve been writing about recently. Those proposed changes, which are also likely to drive up bills for many residents, are slated to come before the council in November.

So how could Austin Energy prevent another year of runaway fuel charges? Adjusting the fees monthly would be one approach. Or the utility could recommend adjustments only when market prices have moved beyond a certain threshold. Or perhaps the utility needs to keep more robust cash reserves on hand to better absorb fluctuating expenses, Adler said.

It’s hard to predict what will happen with fuel prices and the power grid in the coming year. And really, that’s the point. Austin Energy doesn’t have a crystal ball, either. It needs a better mechanism to ensure customers don’t get clobbered by a massive price correction that arrives only once a year.

Grumet is the Statesman’s Metro columnist. Her column, ATX in Context, contains her opinions. Share yours via email at bgrumet@statesman.com or via Twitter at @bgrumet. Find her previous work at statesman.com/news/columns.