Electricity prices expected to rise to all-time record today

By MEDICINE HAT NEWS on January 4, 2022.

https://www.medicinehatnews.com@MedicineHatNews

All-time record prices for electricity are expected today as the City of Medicine Hat announced its floating commodity price for January today.

The city sets its rate at the average of other regulated rate option prices in the province for those without a fixed-rate contract.

Those rates are approved by the Alberta Utilities Commission, and filings last week show the local price would need to be set just over 16-cents per kilowatt hour.

That is double the city’s fixed rate option, which itself rose to 8-cents on January 1.

It is 25 per cent higher than December’s local floating rate and is almost 10 per cent more than the previous all-time record price for power set in January 2012 at 14.81-cents.

Power rate has sat above 10 cents per kilowatt hour in Medicine Hat since the beginning of July.

Last month, administrators said almost 11,000 of the city’s 27,000 residential power customers had signed on for at least six months of fixed price option attached to a price of 6.8-cents before an updated rate was approved last month.

While power prices spike, a recent rise in natural gas prices seems to have reversed. The average price based on filings to the AUC suggest the local floating price for gas will be in the range of $3.61 per gigajoule in January. That’s down from $4.80 in December.

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