To the editor:
I’ve just read Fortis’ report of November 28, 2014 to the British Columbia Utilities Commission (BCUC) on the Residential Conservation Rate (RCR). Your readers may not have read it, since Fortis decided not to publicly announce it at that time.
This report shows that the RCR continues to discriminate against rural residents who have no access to natural gas.
BCUC claims that the RCR “is intended to achieve the policy action of the Provincial Energy Plan” which states that “we must maximize our conservation efforts” and “require the real commitment of all British Columbians to conservation and energy efficiency.”
However, the facts in Fortis’ report refute this claim. The RCR:
• does not maximize energy conservation efforts since it encourages the majority (i.e. 68.5 per cent) of customers to consume more electricity by lowering their electricity bills “without (them) having made any efforts towards conservation behaviour”
• only targets eight per cent of customers (i.e. those who use electricity for space and water heating because they have no access to natural gas) by raising their rates 42 per cent over the last 2 1/2 years on virtually all of the electricity that they consume to heat their homes
• encourages rural customers to switch from environmentally-friendly technologies, such as geothermal, to wood heating that generates harmful air emissions.
Rather than encouraging all customers to conserve electricity, the RCR, in essence, “taxes” rural customers and uses the revenue to subsidize the electricity rates for urban customers.
Fortis states that there is “no one solution” but, of course, they are indifferent to the negative impacts of their pricing system as long as they continue to get their guaranteed revenue. And the Government of B.C. apparently does not care that the BCUC has directed the implementation of a “conservation” rate that does not satisfy the objectives of the Energy Plan but rather is based on the principle that rural customers should freeze in the dark.
Rather than take responsibility for ensuring that their Energy Plan is living up to its commitments, the government is telling those of us unfairly affected to “continue working with the BCUC and Fortis to address your immediate concerns.”
The solution is quite obvious. The failings of the RCR could be addressed by either setting a higher block threshold for those customers with no access to natural gas or by returning to a flat rate for these customers and continuing the two-tier pricing for the remaining.
Unfortunately, nobody is listening.
Jon Rescorla,
Joe Rich, Kelowna
