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I
just got this email this morning, and have made some comments about it:
Dear
EP Electric Customer,
You may have heard that El Paso Electric (EPE) has filed a "rate
case" that may result in rate increases for certain EPE customers. We
have received many questions about what a rate case is and our reason for
filing it. We hope this information helps answer those questions.
A rate case is a regulatory proceeding during which a utility requests a
review of its expenses and an adjustment to customer rates in order to
recover costs on investments that have already been made to serve customers.
Unlike other companies, we can't raise our rates unilaterally even if our
costs have gone up and even if we have spent significant additional funds on
serving our customers. To get compensated for those investments, we must make
a regulatory filing to prove those expenditures were reasonable and
justified. Texas also requires every electric utility to file a rate case
with the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) every four years. For EPE,
the last rate case filed was in 2017*.
Accordingly, our next rate case had to be submitted in 2021. Rate cases are
lengthy processes and the submission is the first step followed by many
hearings and discussions. At the center of these discussions will be whether
EPE should be allowed to include the nearly $1 billion spent to upgrade our
infrastructure and meet the increasing energy demands in our rates. We are
confident that we made these investments to reliably generate and deliver
power to your home and business and to position our region well for economic
development opportunities. However, the ultimate decision on our rates will
be made by our regulators. We would expect that decision to be made by early
2022. 
In the last few years, we have -and we hope you have-seen the value of our
investments. For example, while the rest of Texas was without power during
the recent winter freeze, we were not. When the rest of Texas was dealing
with curtailments during extreme heat, we were not. We - the customers and
the Company - benefited greatly from the investments to weatherize our
equipment and develop diverse generation, among other actions**. Our responsibility
to make sure you are safe and secure with the energy you need for your life
and business is something we take seriously. We work hard to surpass the
level of quality and service every year.
Whatever the outcome is, we will continue to provide you the energy needs you
have come to expect and deserve. You can count on us, every day and in every
type of weather, to not only deal with the challenges of today, but to
prepare for the growth of tomorrow.
Kelly A. Tomblin
President and CEO
El Paso Electric
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*The notice of rate increase that I received made no mention
of these funds already having been invested.
And, again, if these expenditures were indeed investments, doesn’t that
mean they were spent in anticipation of a return through normal income?
**Re: His claim that we
did not experience the outages that the rest of the state suffered is
true. But what he fails to mention is
that we did not have temperatures as low as the rest of the state, or did they
persist for as long a time period. Nor,
does he admit that EPE serves a tiny number of customers in comparison to the
Texas grid.
