Serving the Flathead Valley & Montana since 2006. A reality based independent journal of observation & analysis. © James Conner.
It’s not the Flathead Electric Cooperative, let alone Northwestern Energy. Or any other electrical utility in Montana. Well, then, who? Most likely, the Douglas County Public Utility District in East Wenatchee, WA, which charges residential customers $10.13 per month plus $0.0233 per kilowatt hour — unless you use 650 kWhrs or less a month. In that case, the juice sold across the Columbia River in Wenatchee, WA, by the Chelan County PUD for $7.70 per month plus $0.0270 per kWhr, is cheaper.
In Montana, Northwestern’s electricity is cheaper than Flathead Electric’s up to 385 kWhrs/mth, and over 36,000 kWhrs/mth. That’s because in addition to a lower base charge, Northwestern has a single price per kWhr while FEC uses an ascending block price structure (to encourage conservation) in which the price per kWhr of the top block is higher than Northwestern’s price per kWhr.
If gasoline were priced like utility electricity, there would be a pump charge plus a charge per gallon, and the customer’s cost per gallon [(pump charge + gasoline)/gallons] would vary. The public never would stand for selling gasoline that way, so the costs of extraction, delivery, etc., are rolled into a single price per gallon. Electric utilities, however, are territorial monopolies that can get away with socking their customers with a fixed charge plus a charge per unit of energy sold.
FEC may have the least expensive residential rates in Montana — see the table of rates of selected utilities that accompanies Mike Dennison’s 21 June story on Northwester’s recent price increase — but the public utility districts in central Washington that own hydroelectric dams on the Columbia River have what I believe are the lowest residential electricity rates in the nation. These dams do salmon considerable harm, mitigation notwithstanding, but they provide their customers with a reliable source of inexpensive electricity that the rest of us can only envy.
Below, a table of rates for FEC, Northwestern, and three Washington PUDs, followed by three graphs plotting both the monthly bill and the customers cost per kWhr for the utilities listed in the table. The last graph plots the CC/kWhr crossover points for the FEC-Northwestern situation.
The 36,000 kWhrs/month crossover point may be a null class. A household using that much electricity would have a steady demand of 50 kilowatts per hour. It’s hard to imagine any residence, even of the infamously rich and spendthrifty, drawing that much juice.
