Monday, May 18, 2009 8:49 PM CDT
COLUMN: The cost of nothing is getting expensive
By Tim Zgonina, Staff
tzgonina@jg-tc.com
The American economy, as you know, is in recession. Across the country, businesses and industries are having trouble making ends meet. It’s difficult for many of them to find the revenue to stay afloat.
They should take a cue from AmerenCIPS.
Recently, like a lot of you, I received my Ameren utility bill in the mail. I opened it and looked at the various charges.
Now, I must say it’s not easy to decipher an Ameren bill. The electric service billing detail is spread across several arcane categories: Meter charge. Electric environmental adjustment. Rider EDR charge. Non-summer electricity purchase. Non-summer distribution delivery charge. It’s hard to tell what’s what. And how do I really know how much 174 kilowatt hours is? They say that’s how much I used.
But the natural gas portion of the bill is simple to understand. Even I can figure it out. My bill says I used zero therms of gas. None. Zip. Nada.
Yet they are charging me $18.96.
I used no gas, so they are charging me $18.96 for it.
I wondered about this. In fact, I did more than wonder. I got steamed.
How, I pondered, do they justify charging me for something I didn’t buy?
Figuring there might be some kind of explanation of the various fees, I turned the bill over, and sure enough, there on the back was a list of definitions. Among them was something called a Customer Charge (Unlike the many electricity fees, this was the only gas-related charge on my bill, since I didn’t actually consume any gas itself), and I learned that it “recovers costs of providing energy service that occur even if you do not use electricity or natural gas in the billing period. Included in the charge are billing, accounting and other supplemental charges. For gas service, this also recovers basic gas metering costs.”
I have to wonder about this explanation: Since I didn’t actually use any gas, how could there have been any cost to meter nothing? Or to account for nothing? I may not know how much 174 kilowatt hours is, but I know nothing, believe me.
And what about the costs of providing energy service that occur even if I don’t use natural gas? The house has been there since 1979, for gosh sakes. You’d think that in 30 years, they would have recouped the expense of the meter.
And this doesn’t even take into consideration the fact that natural gas prices have fallen from about $15 a thousand cubic feet to near $4 in less than a year.
So I called Ameren and talked to a very nice customer service person. She politely explained that my $18.96 was simply the standard charge to provide gas service to my house.
(By the way, before this winter, this same charge on my bill used to be $10, so sometime between then and now, it must have got more expensive for them to not sell me the gas I don’t use.)
Anyway, the lady told me that this charge will be a permanent feature of my gas bill. That comes out to approximately $227 a year to have the line attached to my house. In 10 years, that will be more than $2,270. I wonder how much a few feet of pipe and a meter cost?
All of this caused me to think: In this recession, when revenue is hard to come by, maybe more businesses should adopt the Ameren model. It could really help them.
I mean, think about it. At the grocery store, when you don’t buy bananas, they could tack an extra 50 cents onto your bill. After all, they did incur the expense of making bananas available to you; it was your own fault that you didn’t buy them.
Picking up a sandwich for lunch? That’ll be 25 cents for not getting pickles. And at the gas station, when you fill up your tank, they could add a $2 fee for your having used the pump (a type of meter) and a 10 percent surcharge for not buying premium.
It could be a great boost to the economy.
I know, I know. In a world of $400 winter heating bills, $18.96 isn’t much. But it’s the principle of the thing.
And my reasoning is faulty, too, you say. A cell phone provider, for example, charges a monthly fee whether you use your service or not. You get billed for cable even if you never turn on your TV. It’s all about access.
The difference, though, in my opinion, is that these are purely services. Natural gas is a commodity.
Your grocery store doesn’t really bill you for access to bananas.
Your sandwich shop doesn’t really bill you for access to pickles, either, no matter what its underlying infrastructure expenses are.
And I think that charging customers a fee for the “cost” of access to natural gas is disingenuous. Heck, 76 percent of my total bill is for fees, charges and taxes, just 24 percent for actual energy used.
Be honest about it, Ameren: You’ve got us consumers over a barrel.
You can sock us for any amount you want, call it what you want, and like the lady told me, there’s nothing we can do about it.
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Mike P wrote on May 18, 2009 11:00 PM:
Power company monopoly, and phone company monopoly have the public at their mercy once again. Time for another federal intervention/break up, since the state is coddling monopolies and ignoring consumers.
Drop the land line, and add a home cellular line, if needed. That should offset some amerin gouging, until they go back for their next specific profit margin increase, because so many folks are cutting their consumption and using compact florescent bulbs. Sounds like there may soon be LED home lighting. Once that takes off, look for another rediculous rate hike, if it even takes that long. "