New bill format introduced
Lorain-Medina Rural Electric
members’ electric bills have a new look.
Introduced in November 2009
the redesigned bill
clearly shows what it costs to
provide electric service to each
member.
The new bill, shown below, is divided into two sections—Cooperative Services and Fees and Purchased Power Charges.
The Cooperative Services and
Fees section breaks out the
local costs the cooperative
incurs for distributing power
from the substation to the
member’s meter. This section
includes the basic service
charge, the power delivery
service and members and People
Fund contribution, if applicable.
The Purchased Power
Charges shows the cost of
wholesale power purchased
from Buckeye Power, the
wholesale power supplier to
LMRE and the 24 other electric
cooperatives serving Ohio.
Any load management rate
discounts are shown in this
area. If cap-and-trade legislation
would be adopted by the
federal government, this cost
will be shown in this section.
This is the second phase of a
two-stage process to update the
bills.
Last fall, the cooperative began
to itemize the Basic Service
Charge on the bill to provide more
information about what it actually
costs to have a basic electric service
in place. The example below
shows a service charge of
$21. This covers the $19 service
charge for residential accounts,
plus a $2 meter reading charge
for having an automatic meter
reading device, or Turtle® meter,
on a geothermal system.
The service charge covers the
fixed costs of having poles, lines
and meters in place. All members
pay the basic service charge
regardless of how much electricity
they consume each month.
By providing more information
on the bill, members can evaluate
whether it is cost-effective for
them to maintain a separate service
or, if they have multiple services,
whether one or more of them
should be combined in order to
reduce costs.
The bills below shows the "old bill" (left) that members have seen through October and the new or "current bill" that members will see with their November billing.
View Enlarged PDF of New Bill
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