Valley power rates rise

PALMER — Matanuska Electric Association customers will be seeing a hike in their bills, the utility announced Tuesday.

MEA generates very little of its own power, instead purchasing the vast majority of it from Chugach Electric Association.

“The short story is the fuel costs are going up so Chugach is having to raise their rates which is a flow-through to MEA, we have to increase our rates,” said utility spokeswoman Lorali Carter.

The increase stems mainly from a jump in the price of natural gas, the fuel Chugach uses to make most of its electricity.

Essentially, once those costs trickle down to MEA customers, the average power consumer will see an increase of more than $20 on their January bill.

MEA arrived at that figure by looking at average power usage for last January. Then, the average consumer used 1046 kilowatt hours of electricity. Multiply that by the 2.535 cents per Kwh increase and the cost should come out to about $26.53 if the average user consumes as much power this year as he did last year.

Of course, Carter said, “it’s all based on usage.”

Averaged over the year, however, the typical user consumes 800 kwh of power each month.