A regulator has decided how much Hay River residents will pay for their power in the immediate aftermath of March 1’s franchise switch.
The NWT Power Corporation is taking over from Naka Power as the town’s electricity distributor on Saturday after nearly a decade of legal and regulatory wrangling.
A bigger regulatory process to decide power rates across the territory is still playing out, but an interim process to figure out what Hay River residents should pay NTPC for the time being has now concluded.
Regulator the Public Utilities Board decided NTPC should charge Hay River residents slightly more than the power corporation had planned. Naka Power had argued in part that NTPC was planning to undercharge Hay River and charge too much in other places to make up the difference.
Initially, NTPC wanted to set the Hay River residential rate as 27.80 ¢/kWh, which is below the published Naka Power residential rate in Hay River of 32.42 ¢/kWh plus a series of existing riders.
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The Public Utilities Board ruled that the NTPC rate needed to come up slightly, so residents will now also pay a 2.09 ¢/kWh “temporary rider” until the larger territory-wide rate-setting process finishes later this year.
NTPC will be allowed to charge an increased Hay River wholesale rate of 20.00 ¢/kWh despite Naka Power’s objection to that figure, saying it would cause “significant harm” to Naka Power’s remaining customers. (Naka has to pay the wholesale rate to send power to some other Dehcho and South Slave communities.)
Who’s subsidizing who
At the start of the week, Naka Power appeared in front of Yellowknife city council ahead of Yellowknife’s own franchise renewal later this year.
Naka’s Jay Massie told councillors the company thinks NTPC’s approach will leave Yellowknife customers “subsidizing” power rates in the South Slave.
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Massie asserted that NTPC only recovers 70 cents for every dollar it spends generating power in the South Slave, “whereas in Yellowknife, it’s 105.2 percent.”
“Our concern is overcharging of Yellowknife to subsidize those costs for power outside of Yellowknife,” he said.
The NWT Power Corporation, which is also set to present to Yellowknife councillors in the weeks ahead, told Cabin Radio it “disagrees with some of the assertions made by Naka Power.”
NTPC said it agrees that “electricity rates do not currently cover the cost of producing power in the Taltson zone” – but said it was denied by the Public Utilities Board when it tried to fix that two years ago.
In early 2023, the board rejected NTPC’s request for back-to-back 10-percent rate increases. The power corporation had said those increases would bring rates in places like Fort Smith into line with the cost to generate and distribute power. Local leaders said NTPC was acting “like the lords of long ago when they taxed the peasants.”
NTPC said this week that the board’s decision-making, not the power corporation’s approach, is “perpetuating the imbalance” about which Naka Power is complaining.
