ROCHESTER, N.Y. – If you get both natural gas and electric from RG&E, you’re now paying about $11 more per month. The utility entered the third year, of a three-year rate plan, previously approved by state regulators, on May 1st which allows for an increase in delivery rates.
A spokesperson for RG&E says the utility needs the cash in order to expand access to power and make sure the system that brings it to us, is reliable.
“The past couple of years, has just been a whirlwind,” says Shirley Flinders, the senior manager for substation operations at RG&E.
Flinders recently walked News10NBC Investigative Reporter Jennifer Lewke around a substation in Parma, it’s one of the roughly 250 stations she manages. “We can have anywhere from about 5,000 to 8,000 (customers) out of a substation according to what size it is, some of them are bigger, some of them are smaller,” Flinders says.
Many of them need to be expanded. “Anytime you want to increase capacity that means you’re going to have to have a bigger transformer which is what we’re doing here today, we’re increasing the size from 10 to 22 MVA for this transformer which is going to allow us to have a lot more capacity to feed our customers as the customer base here is growing in this area,” she explains.
The cost of doing that upgrade isn’t cheap. “This project here is going to be $5.8 million so, we have to be able to offset that,” Flinders says. And that $5.8m is just for one substation, similar upgrades are needed at dozens of others around our region on top of just regular maintenance and technology upgrades.
“We were quite conservative on that rate increase given the economy at the time, coming out of COVID so these are needed to make these investments,” says Alexis Arnold, RG&E’s spokesperson. Especially, she says, with state mandates that require a broader and fairly quick transition to clean energy.
For now, it’s an extra $11 a month for most people, “in the essence of transparency, we’ve been communicating with our customers with bill inserts and notifications,” Arnold says.
This is the third year of a 3-year rate plan that was previously approved by the NYS Department of Public Service. That means RG&E will be heading back to state regulators soon to negotiate new delivery rates for the years to come and you can bet it’ll be asking for more increases.
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