When BVI Electricity Corporation customers get their next bill, they may notice a few additional lines of information.
In an effort to be more transparent and “customer-centric,” the BVIEC has altered the billing format to include five additional lines of information on fuel surcharges and other calculations, utility officials said during a press conference last Thursday.
“I want customers to be abundantly clear that we have not increased your bills,” said BVIEC Chief Financial Officer Carmen Sully. “What we have done now is shown on the actual bill now the … fuel cost of electricity, and then we have also shown the BVIEC’s fuel subsidy portion.”
Five lines on the new bills show the following information:
• the full fuel surcharge level in terms of dollar per kilowatt hour;
• the level of fuel surcharge “subsidy” the BVIEC provides in terms of dollar per kilowatt hour for the given bill;
• the average cost per gallon of fuel in the billing cycle;
• the cost per gallon paid by the customer; and
• the cost per gallon “subsidised” by the BVIEC.
Fuel surcharge
During the press conference, BVIEC General Manager Neil Smith explained the fuel-surcharge calculation.
“The fuel surcharge was set by legislation in 1978, … and it is the component of the bill that reflects the cost of fuel to actually produce a unit of electricity,” he said. “Interestingly, the customer is not charged 100 percent of the cost of fuel. BVIEC subsidises that to some extent. For every gallon of fuel that is produced now, BVIEC absolves $0.815 of that cost.”
He added that the cost per gallon of fuel changes daily.
“We hear this almost every day: ‘My electricity bill is too high. I use the same electricity that I did last month but it’s 20 percent higher this month,’” he said. “The reason why that happens is because the fuel — the cost of fuel — changes.”
With the new format, customers can now start to compare the cost of fuel for each billing period, he said.
Asked if tariffs in the United States are likely to affect the price of fuel here, Mr. Smith noted that most of the corporation’s fuel is sourced from Texas.
“I mean, I don’t know what [US President Donald] Trump is up to. What I can say from a previous life: that it’s going to cause international trade stress that ultimately would affect us in the BVI,” said Mr. Smith, a former financial secretary. “The price is not going to go down.”
British Caribbean News