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Electricity will be 20 cents per kilowatt hour by 2031, more than 50% more expensive than what we pay today and double what we paid in 2019: Seattle City Light proposed electricity rate chart from 2019 to 2032 Seattle City Light (SCL) is owned by the city, so all of our electricity bills put together add up to all the costs to run Seattle City Light. Our bills are going to get more expensive because running SCL is going to get $1B/year more expensive over the next 6 years: “Revenue Requirement”, or the amount of money it takes to run SCL, 2026 to 2032 The biggest drivers are a) SCL needs more electricity and b) SCL has to fix its aging grid. Getting more electricity SCL expects increasing electricity demand over the coming years, mostly due to EVs, electrifying building heating/cooling, and data centers. Chart of expected electricity demand growth for SCL, 2025 to 2035 Getting more electricity is expensive, because there’s no more cheap hydro to go around. SCL will pay about $240M / year for “new resources”, i.e. new wind and solar by 2032. It will also pay the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), a federal agency that distributes electricity from federally-owned dams on the Columbia River, $150M/year more for both more electricity and more transmission capacity (BPA owns about 75% of the Northwest’s transmission): SCL expenditure amounts, in millions. “BPA Wheeling” is transmission costs. A quick note on data centers SCL forecasts data center demand to go up, but this forecast does not account for the city’s moratorium (the forecast was published before the moratorium, and the moratorium is currently only one year but could be extended). Additionally, SCL has a new rate plan that forces new data centers to pay for all of their own electricity, but this doesn’t apply to existing data centers. Fixing an aging grid SCL will invest $200M/year by 2032 in “reliability”, or fixing its aging grid infrastructure. The biggest line item in this “reliability” bucket will be replacing aging underground cables, which will cost about $2B over the next 15 years. Some cables were undergrounded downtown for practical purposes, but many wealthy neighborhoods had them undergrounded for aesthetic purposes, and now all SCL ratepayers are paying the price. Two other big cost drivers are Inflation and the new Skagit Dams relicensing (which includes fish passage), both of which will each be about $100M / year by 2032. What can we do? First off, if you make less than 70% of WA’s median income (i.e. you make less than $51k / year as a single person, $98k a year as a family of four) then you might qualify for 60% off your electricity bill and 50% off your sewer bill as part of Seattle’s Utility Discount Program. Second, reducing rates for broad ratepayers involves either a) reducing costs or b) shifting costs. To reduce costs, as someone who’s not a utility expert, it’s hard to say. I’m hoping we can find savings on the $2B to replace the underground cables. Shifting costs might be more straightforward. 55% of SCL power goes to commercial and industrial uses: Breakdown of who consumes SCL power (mostly commercial and industrial customers) SCL’s top 10 power consumers include UW at #1, Nucor at #2 (steel recycler in West Seattle), and Sabey Data Centers at #3: Shifting power costs from residential customers to wealthy corporations will be a more fruitful path forward, I suspect. This could be done via a tax on certain classes of electricity consumption (i.e. data center consumption tax), or changing how the cost allocation of new resources is distributed (i.e. residential customers are assumed to be consuming old, cheap hydro, while industrial customers are the ones consuming and paying for new, more expensive power). submitted by /u/calvinrjones |
