Dominion wants thirteen dollars a month from Virginia households for carbon. Nobody's voted yet, so let's ask the question before they do. Power Bill, Tuesday. Kerala's adding a fuel surcharge, Cebu's ticking down, and in Pennsylvania? Thousands missing help they qualify for, and regulators aren't sold on the fix. We'll get to who's blocking it. First, Kerala. The Hindu writes:
The Kerala State Electricity Board (KSEB) will collect 3 paise per unit as surcharge on electricity bills in October. The surcharge is meant to recover the additional spending on power purchases in August this year. The surcharge of 3 paise per unit applies to both monthly and bimonthly-billed consumers of the KSEB.
Kerala first. KSEB is adding 3 paise a unit to October bills, and the reason is August. August's power purchases, specifically. Translate it: a household using 200 units pays about six rupees more. Tiny. But look at the plumbing. The regulator approved an automatic cost-recovery mechanism, so the thermal fuel costs flow straight through. Nobody holds a hearing in September to ask about August. Automatic. That's the word I'd circle. Monthly and bimonthly customers both get it, and there's no step where somebody says, hang on, why did central generating stations and independent producers cost more? And six rupees is exactly the size nobody objects to. Puerto Rico's regulator just froze a charge built the same way because somebody demanded the math. Kerala's version sailed through. Six rupees in October, fine. It's the one-month lag that worries me. Whatever August cost, you find out after you've already used the power. Denise Mae P. Codis, writing in SunStar:
CONSUMERS in Metro Cebu and neighboring areas will see slightly lower electricity bills in September as Visayan Electric reduces its residential rate by P0.07 per kilowatt-hour (kWh). The overall rate will decrease to P14.89 per kWh from P14.96 per kWh in August. While the drop is marginal, it prevents a projected surge that could have pushed rates to P21.24 per kWh during a period of supply constraints.
Seven centavos. Visayan Electric knocks Cebu's residential rate down to P14.89 a kilowatt-hour, and the utility's president is out there warmly welcoming the safeguards. The number that matters is the one they dodged: P21.24. What got it down to P14.89 was an ERC price cap plus IEMOP agreeing to defer certain charges. Deferred. Those costs are still out there. They just got a later due date. And back in March it was P12.36. So after this so-called dip, a Cebu household's still paying roughly twenty percent more per kilowatt-hour than it did in spring. Put it next to the KSEB three paise we just hit. Same pass-through plumbing, one tick up and one tick down, and neither one had a customer at the table. What I'm watching is Senate Bill 2474. Senator Estrada wants to bar utilities from billing customers for system losses, technical and non-technical, which covers theft too. If that passes, the loss sits on the utility's books. I'd like to see an American commission even put that on a hearing agenda. The Cool Down, with Leslie Sattler:
Under RGGI, power producers must buy an allowance for every metric ton of carbon pollution they emit, and utilities like Dominion Energy can pass that cost on to customers. William Shobe, director emeritus of the University of Virginia's Center for Economic & Policy Studies, said prices have climbed roughly 14% a year since 2012 and are likely to keep rising as allowance caps shrink through 2033.
Dominion wants thirteen dollars a month from a typical Virginia customer to cover carbon allowances. It used to be about four-forty. So, nearly triple, and regulators haven't signed off yet. And thirteen is the starting price. UVA's William Shobe says allowance prices have climbed roughly fourteen percent a year since 2012, with caps shrinking through 2033. If the charge tracks that, you're close to doubling it again in five years. So before the State Corporation Commission votes, tell me how this lands on a retiree in Roanoke versus a data-center campus in Loudoun. Because if it's structured anything like a flat fee, she's carrying more than her share. I'll push on that a little. 'Typical customer' suggests it scales with usage, so the big users pay more. But scaling with usage doesn't make it affordable. It's the KSEB story again: costs incurred at auction, showing up on bills later. I'd want an impact number by household income on the commissioners' desk first. Two hundred fifty-nine million dollars from one auction. Great. Now show me how much of it comes back to the people paying the thirteen. From Charlotte Keith at NorthcentralPA.com:
Pennsylvania’s electric and natural gas companies are required to offer discounted bills to low-income customers, but for years the programs have reached only a fraction of those who qualify. Now the long-running debate about how to increase the number of customers getting help is taking on new urgency as utility bills skyrocket and shutoffs hit record highs.
Twenty-three percent. From 2014 to 2024, that's the share of eligible Pennsylvania electric customers who actually got the discount utilities are legally required to offer. Gas? Twenty-two. And look at where the paperwork already stands. A family applies for LIHEAP, proves its income, checks a box letting that data go to the utility. So the utility's got the verification in hand. And the household still has to take another step to get enrolled. Advocates want auto-enrollment. Some of the utilities want it too. When the utility's on your side of the table and the Public Utility Commission is the holdout? I want to hear the commission's objection out loud, and I want to know which household it protects. Same test I'd put to Virginia's thirteen-dollar charge. Show me the per-household math. What's the risk of enrolling someone whose income is already verified, weighed against shutoffs at record highs right now? If you follow Power Bill, you may also like The Data Center Daily, a daily briefing on AI compute, hyperscaler capex, the power grid, semiconductor supply, and energy markets reshaped by intelligence at scale. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts.
Links to every story are in the show notes, so take a look at the ones you want to dig into. Thanks for listening, and we'll be back tomorrow. That's Power Bill for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.