SPRINGFIELD — State Sen. Eric Lesser is calling on Eversource to reverse electricity rate hikes set to kick in Jan. 1 throughout its coverage area, which includes a majority of communities in Hampshire County.
“Eversource is putting profits over people at a time of the year when families are already stretched thin and need heat to survive,” Lesser said in a statement.
Eversource denies the charge, noting that it doesn’t generate power and has no role in setting electricity prices. Instead, the utility buys electricity from suppliers and passes the cost directly to their customers.
“The cost is a strict pass through to our customers and we make no profit on the transaction,” spokeswoman Priscilla Ress said on Thursday.
Earlier this month, Eversource announced to customers that the new rate will be 11.73 cents per kilowatt hour, up 4 percent from the current 10.003 cents. A typical customer using 550 kilowatt-hours per month will pay $4.80 more per month, the utility said.
A similar controversy arose earlier this year. Eversource in January reduced a proposed rate increase for western Massachusetts customers after state Attorney General Maura Healy urged the Department of Public Utilities to recalculate the approved raise due to lower corporate tax rates from the federal government.
Those lowered tax rates gave the utility company nearly $56 million, according to the DPU. Lesser said the tax cuts are permanent, and therefore the utility company should pass those savings onto Massachusetts customers.
“The accumulated savings of the tax cuts add up year after year, meanwhile average people in our community are going to see their electric bill go up,” Lesser said on Friday. “That’s unfair.”
Ress said that since this region does not have a natural gas pipeline, the utility company has to resort to other, more expensive forms of fuel, such as oil, which makes the electricity rate more expensive.
A natural gas pipeline “is not a long-term solution,” said Lesser.
“All of this is a reason why we have to move from imported, dirty energy to creating local, green energy that is much more reliable than the prices of oil,” Lesser said. “We need to move past the reliance on cyclical energy sources such as oil, gas and coal, and move toward local, renewable sources of energy that don’t run out such as wind and solar.”
Eversource is required to set the price for basic service electricity twice a year — once on July 1 and again on Jan. 1 — for six-month periods.
Luis Fieldman can be reached at lfieldman@gazettenet.com