Kansas’ lapdog utility regulators and the winter storm that keeps draining your wallet
Now we know how much we’ll pay on our electric bills from the February freeze of 2021 — and south-central Kansas ratepayers will bear the brunt of it.
That’s no surprise. We always do.
Customers of Evergy Kansas Central — the company formerly known as Westar Energy — will pay $122 million extra in a settlement approved by the Kansas Corporation Commission last week. That translates to $2.82 extra on your bill for two years.
Meanwhile, Kansas City-area customers in Evergy Metro — formerly KCP&L — will be getting refunds because their end of the system profited by selling power on the open market during the freeze emergency. So while our bills are going up, theirs are going down $6.60 a month for a year.
It could have been worse for us. In the settlement, Evergy agreed to limit carrying charges on the costs to 1%, when they probably could have gotten more.
But keep in mind that the electrical side is the smaller portion of costs we’re having to pay for what has come to be called Winter Storm Uri.
If you’re a natural gas customer, it’s going to cost you between $5 and $11 a month for the next few years depending on which gas company you have.
During Uri, the price of natural gas rocketed up from about $3 per million British Thermal Units to the previously unimaginable high of $622.
Suppliers charged those kinds of prices because they could. Gas companies and electric utilities had no choice but to pay, or cut off service and let us all freeze in the dark.
The suppliers had us over a barrel and they knew it. And now, they’ve gotten away with it.
If you’re infuriated by that, good. If you’re not, you should be.
It was obviously price-gouging, but the government people who are supposed to protect us from that sort of thing have all gone AWOL. On every front, our state and federal regulatory agencies have exposed themselves as little more than lapdogs of the energy industry:
▪ The KCC initially announced that it would investigate what happened, but then decided that wasn’t really their thing. They punted it to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and Attorney General Derek Schmidt and have since concentrated on spreading the outrageous consumer costs out in payments over time.
▪ The KCC also let natural gas marketers off the hook for highjacking enough gas off the system to have heated about 200,000 homes during the emergency. The commission waived hundreds of millions of dollars in potential penalties and on top of that let the good ole boys pay the system back for the gas they purloined at deeply discounted rates. Guess who gets stuck with those bills. Hint: you.
▪ In November, FERC managed to issue a 316-page “final report” on the freeze that was essentially nothing more than energy industry excuses and recommendations that the public pay to weatherize gas delivery equipment so it won’t freeze over as easily as it did when it was needed most.
▪ Schmidt spent almost a year to hire outside counsel to investigate whether gas suppliers violated a state law that limits price increases on necessities during emergencies. Since hiring a firm in January, it’s been radio silence. They sent an e mail Wednesday afternoon containing no new information: “Because this is a pending investigation, we have no further comment at this time.”
Just about the only ones fighting for consumers are the tiny town of Mulberry in southeastern Kansas and its lawyer, James Zakoura, a longtime representative for industrial gas and electric customers.
Mulberry has sued for relief under the Kansas Consumer Protection Act and its case, slowly winding its way through the courts, represents our last hope for any sort of ratepayer justice.
Here’s hoping a town of 424 people can succeed where the governments of the state of Kansas and the United States of America have failed.
Check that, they didn’t fail.
They didn’t even try.
This story was originally published June 29, 2022 at 5:17 AM.
