MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Thousands of West Virginia customers will be paying $2 less next year when they took a look at their first electric bill from FirstEnergy.
FirstEnergy Spokesperson Todd Meyers said the company’s announcement on Thursday is a result of Public Service Commission orders regarding the enhanced tree trimming program and energy efficiency program.
“We thought the cost would be this much, the cost actually panned out to be this much,” Meyers said. “So, in the coming year, we asked the Public Service Commission to adjust the rates so that people only pay what we deliver on.”
The average savings will be $1.95 for your typical residential customer using 1,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity per month.
“The regulated utility business is pretty complicated, and there’s a lot of pieces to bills,” Meyers said. “And a lot of what is done is sort of predicated on past experience. We project certain parts of the bill the year before based on past costs.”
The savings includes a $1.44 decrease for tree trimming and a $0.51 decrease for energy efficiency costs.
“We know that it didn’t cost us quite as much in the past year as we had projected,” Meyers said.
The enhanced tree trimming program, which began in April 2014, has trimmed trees ground-to-sky along more than 19,000 miles of transmission and distribution line right-of-way.
“Each customer, residential customer, will pay about $110 on their monthly bill, rather than $112 dollars per month,” Meyers said.
Meyers said savings could vary customer to customer depending on electricity use. Commercial and industrial customers would also see some savings, Meyers said.