The charge for getting electricity to Houston-area homes keeps climbing, and the interesting part isn't the fuel. It's who decided that line gets to move. You're on Power Bill. A Texas law, Kenya's October bill pulled apart charge by charge, and what commissioners are supposed to weigh before anything lands on yours. Spoiler: sometimes they barely get to. We start in League City. Tap follow so the next episode finds you.
Here's League City Herald:
League City households served by CenterPoint saw their delivery charge jump from 4.99 cents per kilowatt-hour in March to 6.41 cents in September, a roughly 28% increase, the Houston Chronicle reported. By Oct. 7, KPRC 2 reported the rate had climbed again to 6.53 cents. The rapid increases trace to a 2023 state law that lets transmission and distribution utilities seek rate hikes more often and with less regulatory review.
If you're in League City on a fixed-price electricity contract, you probably think your bill is locked. The delivery line isn't. Per the Houston Chronicle, it went from 4.99 cents a kilowatt-hour in March to 6.41 in September. Then 6.53 by October seventh, per KPRC 2. Run that on a 1,000-kilowatt-hour month and you're paying about fifteen dollars and forty cents more than in March, on a line your retail contract never touched. And you can't shop it. Switch providers all you want, CenterPoint still moves the power to your house. So the one charge you can't escape is the one a 2023 state law, Senate Bill 1015, lets them raise more often, with less review. That's the line I'd circle. Three moves since March, each one small, each one getting a lighter look. Most households would have to set three bills side by side just to notice. I spent last week asking how a surcharge gets approved in a room a renter never heard of. Texas answered it: shrink the room, by statute.
Here's Kibaki Muthamia at Pulse Kenya:
Electricity consumers face additional costs this month after the Energy and Petroleum Regulatory Authority published three notices in the Kenya Gazette on October 9. The adjustments comprise a Sh3.22 fuel energy cost charge, a Sh0.87 foreign-exchange fluctuation adjustment and a Sh0.0134 water-resource management levy per kilowatt-hour. Together, they come to approximately Sh4.10 per unit.
EPRA's October ninth notices put a currency adjustment on Kenya Power bills: eighty-seven cents per unit, applied to September readings. Customers are paying for exchange-rate movement after the electricity's already been used. And watch the dates. Pulse Kenya reports three-point-two-two shillings per unit for fuel and zero-point-zero-one-three-four for the water levy, both on October readings. Add those to the forex charge and you get roughly four-ten—but that's a sum of charge components, not evidence your bill rose four-ten per unit from last month. The fuel piece alone means three hundred twenty-two shillings for a hundred October units. That's the largest of these three charges, and it's worth finding separately on the bill. Separately is the key. These charges sit alongside the rest of the electricity tariff; four-ten isn't the whole price. And with September readings feeding one adjustment and October readings feeding two others, check the reading period before comparing bills.
When a utility asks for higher rates, are commissioners just deciding whether the company gets the number it requested? And why can a proposal sit around for so long before it reaches my bill? No. A rate case is more like a court-like review of the utility’s books and plans than a simple up-or-down vote. WBUR reports that utilities periodically bring regulators their receipts for what they have spent and what they expect to spend over the next few years; commissioners then weigh whether those costs should be collected from customers. They also have to consider the utility’s request alongside objections from consumer advocates and other participants, which can involve expert testimony. The requested increase is not automatic: Arizona utilities APS and TEP, for example, are seeking 14% increases affecting nearly 2 million customers, while customers and advocates have pushed back. And regulators can reject a particular way of recovering costs even when they have allowed the underlying project: Oklahoma commissioners denied OG&E’s request to bill customers during construction of gas turbines, despite the project having received preapproval. So the delay is partly the point—time to test the utility’s evidence—but does that mean customers can get hit later with a bigger catch-up increase? It can create what supporters call “regulatory lag,” the gap between when costs change and when rates are updated. Arizona Capitol Times reports that APS and TEP are seeking formula rates that would allow annual adjustments instead of less-frequent large hikes; supporters say that reduces the lag, while critics warn it could weaken consumer protections and accountability. The practical thing to watch is the final commission order: it determines not just whether rates change, but which costs customers are allowed to pay and when.
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Links to every story are in the show notes, if you want to read more about the ones that caught your attention. Thanks for listening, and we’ll be back tomorrow. That’s Power Bill for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.