This is such an eye-popping number, I hope somebody out there can confirm it for us. As written in yesterday\u2019s Tribune, the CUC is reportedly eyeing jacking up electric rates for some users (Rota, notably) to the astronomically high price of 46.85 cents per kilowatt hour (abbreviated kWh if you care to abbreviate such things).<\/p>\n
To which I say: No way. That can\u2019t really happen. Not even in the CNMI can that happen.<\/p>\n
There is no place on the face of this earth that I have ever heard of that charges that much for electricity.<\/p>\n
Coincidentally, today I was eyeing electricity rates in the southern U.S., where my brother and I are looking to purchase some land so he can hunt on it, and I can vacation there, drink beer, swat mosquitos, and pull ticks off my dog\u2019s butt (the Stephens brothers sure know how to party, eh?). Don\u2019t ask me why I would investigate electricity rates where I\u2019ll probably not be using any of it. Habit, I guess. I used to be an energy analyst, and I\u2019m simply used to researching such things. I sort of use energy prices as a minor benchmark for how efficient an economy is.<\/p>\n
Anyway, those southern boys have a convoluted way of pricing out the juice, but I derived a price of about 7.5 to 8.2 cents per kWh for those magic electrons. And that ain\u2019t cheap, by the way.<\/p>\n
So there\u2019s your benchmark. Okay, we\u2019re off the beaten path here in the CNMI, so maybe we could justify, based on an intuitive stab, about 12 cents a kWh here in the islands. Actually, that\u2019s a pretty liberal stretch, but I\u2019m a liberal kind of guy.<\/p>\n
So there\u2019s your quantitative context. Twelve cents per kWh based on reasonably well-educated intuition, versus a reported 46.85 cents based on yesterday\u2019s article.<\/p>\n
I can\u2019t imagine any business that wouldn\u2019t shut its doors at the sound of that, based on two factors. One, of course, would be the raw cost of the juice itself. The other would be that such horridly obscene rates betray some underlying issues that no respectable businesses man, nor citizen, would want to confront in the dark.<\/p>\n
As far as residential rates go, the reported target for Rota\u2019s fair citizens was about 32 cents per kWh. That\u2019s still unimaginably high. I don\u2019t know what the average home consumes every month there, but, given the need for aircon in these parts, I\u2019d say that 800 kWh per month would be a reasonable figure for a small home. So, we\u2019d be looking at a monthly bill of $256. At 1,200 kWh, which wouldn\u2019t be hard to imagine at all if you keep that cooooool air blowing, you\u2019d be looking at a coooool $384 a month.<\/p>\n
Hopefully, the reported figures are a victim of printing press hacking by a rogue gang of Martian jokers. Or maybe they got quoted in yen or something. But there is no way, absolutely no way at all, that such reported rates could survive in the real economic world. Businesses would close immediately, and home owners would be looking to enforce some accountability at boot-point.<\/p>\n
Rest assured, we should follow this one closely.<\/p>\n
Ed Stephens, Jr. is an economist and columnist for the Saipan Tribune. \u201cEd4Saipan@yahoo.com\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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