JACKSON, Miss.–If you’re an Entergy customer, you probably already know your rates are going up for the fall. Now there’s a possibility of another rate increase, but this one comes with the promise of projects that could keep what you pay lower in the long-run, say people with the company.
The plan, looking ahead to 2025, includes improving reliability, modernizing the grid, maintaining Entergy’s workforce, stabilizing rates, utilizing new technologies, attracting new industry and more, according to a statement released Tuesday. To that end, the company filed what is called a rate case with the state’s Public Service Commission.
That means, basically, the company wants to raise its rates, and the plan includes justification for it.
Under the plan, for the typical residential customer using 1,000 kWh per month, your bill would go up by approximately $6.28, or about .20 cents per day.
But, Entergy says you wouldn’t actually see you bill go up that much because it has been able to offset those costs by the “expiration of other charges being billed on a temporary basis, including the recently approved fuel and ad valorem tax increases totaling $5.57. The net impact on typical customer bills is expected to be less than .75 cents, or less than .03 cents a day”.
This is what you would get in return for the increase, if all goes as planned:
- · Three 500 KW utility-scale solar power projects
- · A green power option for customers
- · Distribution and transmission improvements to modernize the grid and reduce outage frequency and length
- · Rate incentives to help attract new and expanding industrial customers
- · New regulatory mechanisms to aid in providing electrical service to attractive industrial sites. This will help attract economic development and job creation
- · Making a two-year discount permanent for eligible, new small businesses
“Over the last 12 years, we’ve been keeping pace in the midst of a rapidly changing power landscape that includes more stringent and expensive federal regulation,” said Entergy president and CEO Haley Fisackerly. “Working in partnership with the MPSC, we’ve been successful in managing the higher risks and challenges we’ve faced, and I believe we’ve done what our customers and regulators would want their electric utility to do: make wise decisions to keep costs down now and make prudent investments to keep costs down in the future. This plan will help us continue to do so.”
Last month the Public Service Commission approved a five percent rate increase for Mississippi customers, due to the cost of natural gas and refueling of the Grand Gulf nuclear power plant.
“We work hard to keep rates low and do not take any rate increase lightly,” said Fisackerly. “With the proposed increase, Entergy Mississippi rates are expected to remain both below the national average and among the lowest residential rates in the state and the Southeast.”
