Over this summer, homeowners have opened utility bills to find doubled or even tripled prices that they owe. Ameren Illinois Vice President of Regulatory Policy and Energy Supply, Matt Tomc, breaks down the reason behind the higher bills and the lower costs on the horizon:
“What federal government regulators have been worried about for years is this concern of not enough electric supply. Over the past few years, they have tried to make some adjustments to regulate energy markets to better value what we call capacity, which is paying for generators to be ready to run. When that hot summer day comes, we need lots of generators out there ready to crank up and run. There are less generators today, I think, than there were a few years ago capable of delivering that type of capacity, so what happened was that price that we pay for that generator availability went from $30 a megawatt day to $666.50. That has a significant impact on your electrical commodity prices, upward of 50 percent,” reports Tomc.
“It is the summer season where those prices are really coming up. So, that is what has happened this summer. I will say this, once we get out of the summer season period at the end of September, we will transition back to a lower price that is more in line with what we have historically experienced,” Tomc adds.
Illinois is a deregulated state for both natural gas and electricity, meaning homeowners and businesses are able to choose their energy provider and shop around for better rates and plans.
