DENVER – Southwest Colorado’s electricity cooperatives hoped this would be the week they could force their power supplier to back off a new policy that means big price increases for many customers.
But now they will have to wait until June to see if their bid will succeed.
La Plata Electric Association and Empire Electric Association want state regulators to overturn a new rate by Tri-State Generation and Transmission, which supplies the co-ops with power. The new rate discriminates against co-ops that have worked for years to become more energy efficient, said Greg Munro, CEO of La Plata Electric Association.
La Plata, Empire and several gas-and-oil companies have filed a case against Tri-State at the Colorado Public Utilities Commission. But Tri-State has always maintained the PUC can’t tell it what to do because it’s not an investor-owned utility such as Atmos Energy or Xcel Energy.
A PUC judge canceled a Wednesday hearing and instead scheduled a hearing for early June to determine whether the state has jurisdiction over Tri-State.
Tri-State maintains that it is not accountable to the state government, but to the 44 co-ops that own it and govern it through its board.
“We have a democratically elected board of directors. That’s the appropriate place for decisions to be made regarding our association’s rates,” said Lee Boughey, a Tri-State spokesman.
But Munro said attempts to work with Tri-State’s board didn’t work.
“We didn’t get a lot of input,” Munro said. “We felt we were just ignored.”
So Southwest Colorado co-ops took the unusual step of asking the PUC to intervene.
Although Tri-State says state and federal law forbid the state from vetoing its rates, Munro thinks he has a case.
“Discriminatory rates are still illegal in Colorado. That’s what we’re saying happened,” Munro said.
The biggest losers from the new Tri-State rate, which took effect in January, are customers who use power in off-peak times. That includes big industrial customers such as BP and other gas companies, as well as the 5,000 or so households that signed up to get discounts for shifting their power use to the evening, instead of peak-use daytime hours.
The rate for customers on the time-of-use program went up 38 percent, and many of them are leaving the program, Munro said. A major gas company wants to abandon LPEA’s electricity and use its own natural gas to run its compressor stations, Munro said.
Tri-State’s spokesman, though, said the company is still providing discounts for co-ops that shift their power use to off-peak times. But the new rate is designed to be more fair than the old one, and that means some co-ops won’t have the same deals they did in the past.
“Our board’s rate principles include equity and wanting to make sure there’s a much smaller spread for our member co-ops,” Boughey said.
But before the PUC will hear any of those arguments, its administrative law judge needs to decide if the agency even has jurisdiction over Tri-State. However the June hearing turns out, Munro expects the decision to be appealed, meaning a resolution is at least months away.
jhanel@durangoherald.com
