National Grid electricity rates for some customers will go up this month — only for the 4,000 largest accounts using the most electricity. Homes and most businesses will not be affected, according to a company spokesperson.
“These are not residential customers,” said National Grid communications manager Jared Paventi. “We’re not talking about McDonald’s. We’re talking about large, large customers who are energy savvy and usually have energy managers who handle these things.”
mr. Paventi said the affected customers are those using 100 kilowatts of electricity per month or more. By comparison, he used as an example a house with three bedrooms and two bathrooms measuring 1,100 square feet with central air conditioning. He said that he uses about 1.75 kilowatts in a high-usage month like June, when the air conditioning may be running around the clock. The affected businesses are using enough electricity to power more than 50 homes for a month.
Those 4,000 largest customers have a line on their monthly bills labeled TRA, or transmission revenue adjustment. That can be a cost or credit incurred when there are issues with parts of the power transmission network.
“In the months of May and June there was unusual and significant congestion on the transmission network,” Mr. Paventi said. That will lead to a hike of 10% to 16% on the next bill for those 4,000 largest customers.
National Grid will pay them back, with interest, most likely in November. First, National Grid has to find the cause of the congestion, which Mr. Paventi said it is still pending.
“We go back and determine what caused the congestion, and who caused the congestion. It could be any number of entities… That entity is charged for the disruption cost, and basically pays back into the TRA, whatever the charge was, and we distribute those funds to customers with interest to true up and make them whole again,” Mr. . Paventi said. “It wouldn’t be a company that caused it, necessarily. It could be any number of components on the network. Say we had to take down lines doing a system replacement. Then it would be on our back… it’s not going to be one of our commercial customers that causes this.”
He said the cause can sometimes be “something in the technical environment of managing an electricity network.”
“It could be within the state. It could be any number of transmission or generation or any other entities that control, or maybe do work in those areas where they’re taking lines offline,” he added.
mr. Paventi said any residential or smaller business customers with billing concerns can call National Grid at 1-800-642-4272.
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