Golden Valley Electric Association Issues
Golden Valley Electric Association is a member owned cooperative of over 45,000 services in a large area of Interior Alaska served by the road system. This blog seeks to provide information and encourage dialog amongst members, board members and MAC members. If GVEA members (even board and staff!) would like to contribute to this blog, you can email me at gvea(at)chena.org. Anyone can comment on an existing blog entry.
Sunday, June 21, 2015
Forwarding to other page
Friday, June 12, 2015
Newman elected to GVEA board for District 4
Monday, June 01, 2015
RCA on Railbelt Utilities working together
Wednesday, May 27, 2015
Upcoming issues for the GVEA board
District 4 Please Vote
Tuesday, March 03, 2015
Newman running for GVEA Board District 4
I have my website at gvea.chena.org and you are welcome to like my Facebook page Newman for GVEA.
Two way communication and transparency have been a mainstay of my advocacy for GVEA for decades - I don't see that changing. Reliability, keeping rates reasonable, trying to help moderate our increasing debt load are also pretty important tasks for the board.
Ballots will be mailed out May 8 with a month to get them back to GVEA. In the next couple months, I will be talking with our members to hear their concerns and let members hear from me as well. I will of course be at the annual meeting Wed. April 29, 2015, this year at Lathrop High School's Hering Auditorium.
I'm looking forward to this effort to help our co-op. It is a demanding effort for anyone serving on the board and I now have the time and decades of involvement to be able to give back to GVEA.
Feel free to contact me if you want to chat: gvea@chena.org or 907-488-2001
Monday, February 09, 2015
Green Power Advisory Board
Friday, February 06, 2015
Energy charge reduced due to low international oil prices
Saturday, January 10, 2015
Candidates for Board seats Districts 4 and 7
Sunday, December 14, 2014
GVEA Capital Budget for 2015
GVEA projects $21 million principal payment on debt and additional loans and other financing of $94 million.
Big chunk of change. You can read the details starting on page 18 of the member book located here.
Thursday, December 04, 2014
Rate history
There are two major components to consumption: Utility charge and energy charge.
The utility charge is everything not related to the cost of energy, such as operations, administration, legal, interest, depreciation and payment on loans, distribution and transmission costs.
Energy charge is everything that is related to the cost of energy. It was formerly known as COPA - the cost of power adjustment and meant to allow a utility to change their rates based upon the fluctuating cost of energy (oil, gas, coal, etc.) What is allowed to be included is set by the Regulatory Commission of Alaska. For example, some years ago GVEA asked that the cost of ash disposal from the Healy coal fired power plant be allowed to be included in the COPA (the RCA said yes). More recently, GVEA had asked to include the cost of building Eva Creek wind farm in COPA, as there is no energy charge from wind. GVEA withdrew that request after realizing that the RCA wouldn't rule on it in time for it to be of financial advantage to GVEA.
Both rates are initially set after a rate study, which GVEA only does when there is a major shift in the numbers, such as inclusion of a new power plant. Such studies cost over a million dollars so not to be done lightly.
The utility charge is allowed to be changed in the interim every 6 months through a SRF (simplified rate filing) to the RCA, but not more than 8% in a year. The energy charge can be changed quarterly and is subject to this complex formula.
In addition to these two charges, there is a fixed customer charge for the cost of having a meter, regardless of whether you use electricity or not and then a very minor regulatory charge to compensate the RCA for overseeing the public interest of utilities,
If you are a large commercial or industrial customer, you will have a lower utility rate, but then also have a demand charge, based upon your peak consumption for the past 12 months. GVEA talks about all these charges on their website. They do have a handy bill calculator as well. It would be interesting to have a table like below that would go back further.
So here is the last 4 years of rates by month.
Month | Utility | Energy | Subtotal |
Dec-14 | $ 0.10341 | $ 0.09947 | $0.20288 |
Nov-14 | $ 0.10341 | $ 0.10378 | $0.20719 |
Oct-14 | $ 0.10341 | $ 0.10378 | $0.20719 |
Sep-14 | $ 0.10341 | $ 0.10378 | $0.20719 |
Aug-14 | $ 0.10341 | $ 0.10593 | $0.20934 |
Jul-14 | $ 0.10341 | $ 0.10593 | $0.20934 |
Jun-14 | $ 0.10341 | $ 0.10593 | $0.20934 |
May-14 | $ 0.10001 | $ 0.09496 | $0.19497 |
Apr-14 | $ 0.10001 | $ 0.09496 | $0.19497 |
Mar-14 | $ 0.10001 | $ 0.09496 | $0.19497 |
Feb-14 | $ 0.10001 | $ 0.09631 | $0.19632 |
Jan-14 | $ 0.10001 | $ 0.09631 | $0.19632 |
Dec-13 | $ 0.09724 | $ 0.09631 | $0.19355 |
Nov-13 | $ 0.09724 | $ 0.10576 | $0.20300 |
Oct-13 | $ 0.09724 | $ 0.10576 | $0.20300 |
Sep-13 | $ 0.09724 | $ 0.10576 | $0.20300 |
Aug-13 | $ 0.09724 | $ 0.08774 | $0.18498 |
Jul-13 | $ 0.09724 | $ 0.08774 | $0.18498 |
Jun-13 | $ 0.09724 | $ 0.08774 | $0.18498 |
May-13 | $ 0.09597 | $ 0.11078 | $0.20675 |
Apr-13 | $ 0.09597 | $ 0.11078 | $0.20675 |
Mar-13 | $ 0.09597 | $ 0.11078 | $0.20675 |
Feb-13 | $ 0.09597 | $ 0.10802 | $0.20399 |
Jan-13 | $ 0.09597 | $ 0.10802 | $0.20399 |
Dec-12 | $ 0.09004 | $ 0.10802 | $0.19806 |
Nov-12 | $ 0.09004 | $ 0.13768 | $0.22772 |
Oct-12 | $ 0.09004 | $ 0.13768 | $0.22772 |
Sep-12 | $ 0.09004 | $ 0.13768 | $0.22772 |
Aug-12 | $ 0.09004 | $ 0.12379 | $0.21383 |
Jul-12 | $ 0.09004 | $ 0.12379 | $0.21383 |
Jun-12 | $ 0.09004 | $ 0.12379 | $0.21383 |
May-12 | $ 0.09004 | $ 0.12527 | $0.21531 |
Apr-12 | $ 0.09004 | $ 0.12527 | $0.21531 |
Mar-12 | $ 0.09004 | $ 0.12527 | $0.21531 |
Feb-12 | $ 0.09004 | $ 0.12737 | $0.21741 |
Jan-12 | $ 0.09004 | $ 0.12737 | $0.21741 |
Dec-11 | $ 0.08791 | $ 0.12737 | $0.21528 |
Nov-11 | $ 0.08791 | $ 0.10924 | $0.19715 |
Oct-11 | $ 0.08791 | $ 0.10924 | $0.19715 |
Sep-11 | $ 0.08791 | $ 0.10924 | $0.19715 |
Aug-11 | $ 0.08791 | $ 0.10943 | $0.19734 |
Jul-11 | $ 0.08791 | $ 0.10943 | $0.19734 |
Jun-11 | $ 0.08791 | $ 0.10943 | $0.19734 |
May-11 | $ 0.08337 | $ 0.10051 | $0.18388 |
Apr-11 | $ 0.08337 | $ 0.10051 | $0.18388 |
Mar-11 | $ 0.08337 | $ 0.10051 | $0.18388 |
Feb-11 | $ 0.08337 | $ 0.08929 | $0.17266 |
Jan-11 | $ 0.08337 | $ 0.08929 | $0.17266 |
Dec-10 | $ 0.08337 | $ 0.08929 | $0.17266 |
Nov-10 | $ 0.08337 | $ 0.09137 | $0.17474 |
Oct-10 | $ 0.08337 | $ 0.09137 | $0.17474 |
Sep-10 | $ 0.08337 | $ 0.09137 | $0.17474 |
Aug-10 | $ 0.08337 | $ 0.09401 | $0.17738 |
Jul-10 | $ 0.08337 | $ 0.09401 | $0.17738 |
Jun-10 | $ 0.08337 | $ 0.09401 | $0.17738 |
May-10 | $ 0.08337 | $ 0.09890 | $0.18227 |
Apr-10 | $ 0.08337 | $ 0.09890 | $0.18227 |
Mar-10 | $ 0.08337 | $ 0.09890 | $0.18227 |
Feb-10 | $ 0.08337 | $ 0.09886 | $0.18223 |
Tuesday, September 16, 2014
In the meantime ... transmission improvements
Readers may recall reading about the various $900 million in recommended transmission improvements in a report from the Alaska Energy Authority. It didn't include proposed trucked natural gas in its projections, but is still draft.
And with all the spare capacity in the railbelt, there doesn't appear to be any crying need for Susitna.
So many moving parts.
Monday, September 15, 2014
Notification system progress
Our supply is: Baseload resources
Load following (i.e. flexible on/off and capacity adjusting)
Renewable sources
The look above, once we have Healy 2 on line, is that except in the deep winter, we won't be taking much natural gas from Anchorage as it runs about the same price as Healy 2 is expected to.
All this being said, there are other reasons to have a notification system.
One of the challenges and opportunities is that GVEA's contact info on members is way out of date, especially as far as cell phones and email. This would be an opportunity to get updated. Perhaps this could be a MAC job?
GVEA might consider an inexpensive notification system such as FNSB Air Quality Dept is now rolling out (3rd party alertmedia.com , a Nixle like service) with an in-house Google form to sign up. Notifications could be for a variety of reasons: outages, price signaling, board and annual membership meetings, RCA hearings, etc.
I was told that GVEA is anticipating spending $300,000 in a future budget to upgrade their outage notification system with lots of bells and whistles. Maybe this is way too much? As it is now, it appears that Facebook offers more information about outages in progress than any other form of communication.
So we will see where this goes.