A regulator in Puerto Rico just looked at a proposed fuel-charge jump and said: nope. Not until somebody shows me the math. This is Power Bill. Today: a subsidy with an expiration date, Ohio candidates promising cheaper power, and cheaper gas that somehow never reaches your bill. We start in San Juan, with three different fuel forecasts and one regulator hitting pause. From Eva Llorens at Caribbean Business:
The Puerto Rico Energy Bureau has ordered Genera PR, LUMA Energy and the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) to explain the interruption in natural gas supply at the San Juan power plant and to reconcile major discrepancies in their fuel cost projections, warning that the proposed rate increases for the fourth quarter of 2026 cannot be approved until the record is clarified.
So picture this. The gas storage ship leaves San Juan on September 16 and doesn't come back. A tanker called the Amur River is parked twelve miles offshore. And LUMA, Genera and PREPA each hand the Energy Bureau a different fuel number. Three companies, one grid, and nobody reconciled their math before filing. Here's the dosage. LUMA wants the fuel charge to go from about 11.4 cents a kilowatt-hour to about 18.1. That's six dollars sixty-seven more per hundred kilowatt-hours. A household using 400 a month would pay roughly twenty-six dollars more, every month, for fuel alone. And that's built on assumptions about gas that hasn't reached San Juan or Palo Seco since mid-September. So who was checking those projections before the Bureau caught it? The ratepayer side sure didn't have the staff to. I'll push back a little, though. The September 25 order says nothing gets approved until the record is clarified, and that's the regulator doing its job. Proposed stays proposed. That charge isn't on anyone's bill, and for once I'd like listeners to hear that as good news. From I3investor:
Last week, the government announced that households consuming 800 kilowatt-hour of power or less monthly will now be spared from surcharges under the automatic fuel adjustment. The exemption is previously provided only to those using under 600 kilowatt-hour each month.
Look at who got reassured first. Tenaga's share price dips, and on Tuesday they sit down with analysts to promise the bigger household exemption is a one-off. The investors got the memo before the customers did. And the wording BIMB passed along matters. Tenaga calls it a corporate contribution sitting outside the regulatory framework, with no change to the revenue-cap or price-cap mechanism. So no regulator locked it in. The 800-kilowatt-hour threshold, up from 600, runs through the end of this year, and that's it. Up to RM150 million. And the analysts are already calling that conservative, saying the real cost could come in lower. Nice. The relief's getting trimmed in the investor notes before it ever shows up on anyone's bill. Then there's the permanent fix for 2027 onwards. We're hearing about it secondhand, through CIMB, with no threshold attached. Back in Puerto Rico, the regulator held the charge until the numbers added up. Here, a household using 750 kilowatt-hours gets a December expiry and a promise. Nick Evans, writing in The Highland County Press:
The Public Utilities Commission of Ohio maintains an online dashboard detailing utility costs by city. Last month, 15 of the 16 metro areas listed reported higher year-over-year electric bills. Cleveland and Ashtabula led the pack with a 28.1% increase; Cincinnati was the lone exception, more or less holding steady with a decline of.4%.
PUCO's own dashboard shows fifteen of sixteen Ohio metros up year over year. Cleveland and Ashtabula are up 28.1 percent. And the loudest promise in the governor's race is Vivek Ramaswamy offering free electricity near data centers, which the experts in this piece can't explain how you'd do legally. Free is technically a number. But 28.1 percent is the household number. If you paid a hundred and fifty a month in Cleveland last year, you're paying roughly forty-two dollars more now. And that came out of PUCO dockets and PJM capacity decisions. Nobody set it on a debate stage. So name the docket. One candidate, one rider, one vote. Arkansas legislators at least got as far as asking who absorbs data-center costs in an early-recovery rider running twenty-two eighty-one a month. Ohio gets 'restrictions' and 'streamlined permitting.' And nobody's asking about Cincinnati, down four-tenths of a percent. Same state, same PJM footprint. So what did that rate order do differently? That's what I'd put to both campaigns, especially after watching Puerto Rico's regulator actually stop the clock. Muddy River News writes:
Governor JB Pritzker and the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity (DCEO) are encouraging eligible families to apply for the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) to support income eligible households with utility costs for natural gas, propane and electricity. Applications will open Oct. 1, and will remain open through Aug. 13, 2027, or until funds are exhausted.
Illinois LIHEAP opens Wednesday and runs through August 13th of next year, "or until funds are exhausted." So the actual deadline is whenever the money runs out. And nobody can tell you that date in advance. Which means the calendar works against the households who need it most. You get a disconnection notice in February, and you're applying for whatever's left after the October rush. How many months did last year's pot actually last? Print that right next to the hotline number. And it's a one-time payment. It lands once, and the rate it's helping cover keeps billing you every month after. That's the sequence I keep coming back to. A commission approves an increase without a per-household dollar figure attached, and then the state mails out checks after the fact. Cleveland's up 28.1 percent. One check doesn't cover a number like that by month two. The Governor says no family should have to choose between heat and food. Then fund it like you mean the whole winter. Okay, listener question. If natural gas is getting cheaper, why doesn't my electric bill just go down? And how would I even know if my utility's passing any fuel savings along? Because the fuel that makes the electricity is only one piece of what you pay for. E&E News by POLITICO says U.S. natural-gas prices at the Henry Hub benchmark have been steady and trending down. But Rhodium Group says the recent electricity-price increases come from a bunch of overlapping pressures, and they differ by region and utility. Spending on distribution and transmission, inflation, storm recovery, wildfire mitigation, shifting policy. Gas is just one line in that. Inside Climate News reports rates nationwide rose 5 percent in 2025, and the causes varied a lot from place to place. So cheaper gas can ease one pressure while the rest of the bill keeps climbing. So what should I look for on the bill before I decide those savings never showed up? Stop looking at just the total. Consumer Reports points to usage charges, delivery fees, and taxes as separate pieces of the bill. If the energy-supply part drops but delivery goes up, your total may not budge. And if the bill's hard to decode, the fine print usually has clues about what changed. Compare those line items month to month. Don't assume cheaper gas moves every part of the bill together. If you're enjoying Power Bill, please subscribe or leave us a review wherever you're listening. Reviews help other people find the show, and they help us keep making these briefings for you.
Looking ahead: the fourth-quarter billing period starts October 1, and we'll be watching whether Puerto Rico's Energy Bureau acts once Genera, LUMA, and PREPA respond on the San Juan LNG outage. Illinois LIHEAP priority applications also open October 1. And Ohio's November governor's election will keep utility bills and data-center policy in the spotlight.
Links to every story are in the show notes, so you can dig into whatever caught your attention. That's Power Bill for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.