NB Power wants 12.8 per cent rate hike starting next year

NB Power wants to increase residential power rates by 12.8 per cent next year.

On Friday, NB Power filed two requests to New Brunswick's Energy and Utilities Board: a general rate application asking for a 9.8 per cent increase for residential customers in both 2024 and 2025, and a variance account application asking for a three per cent increase in 2024.

According to NB Power, the average residential customer will see their bill increase by $24.53 a month if both applications are approved for April 1, 2024.

"We understand how difficult this will be for our residential customers," said Lori Clark, NB Power’s president and CEO, on Friday. "We're trying to balance the impact on rates with the health of the utility and the reliability of our assets.

“We are doing this as quickly as we can to improve the financial health, but we always be concerned about the impacts on our customers and the reliability of our system.”

Clark said long-term outages at the Point Lepreau Nuclear Generating Station this year, and the need for replacement fuel, contributed largely to the utility’s variance rate request.

Clark said NB Power’s mandate to be coal free by 2030, and net-zero by 2035, also called for higher hikes now.

"We also have a responsibility to ensure that our infrastructure is strong and that we’re making the investments when we need to make the investments for now and well into the future.”

Clark said NB Power cut about $50 million from its operations budget in 2023/24.

On Thursday, New Brunswick Auditor General Paul Martin raised concerns about NB Power's $5-billion debt load with large scale infrastructure projects approaching.

NB Power's deadline to achieve a debt-to-equity ratio of 80/20 was extended from 2027 to 2029 by the New Brunswick government this fall.

"We want to see (NB Power) put together a rate increase that does the trick," said Natural Resources and Energy Development Minister Mike Holland in an interview Friday. "What the utility has done, they've put together a rate request that is going to accomplish the goals they've set out to achieve."

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