Rates & Policies

This will vary depending on the type and extent of your usage, but the average residential member’s bill will increase by 5.95% or $8.38 per month.

SECPA uses a cost-of-service approach to determine rates. This means the cooperative calculates the cost of delivering electricity to its members, including expenses such as infrastructure maintenance, operating costs, and power supply. These costs are split among the members in each rate class. Part of the costs are recovered through the access or customer charge and the rest of the costs are recovered through kWh sales and demand charges when applicable.

The new rates will take effect August 1, 2024. The bill you get in September will be the first bill to use the new rates.

The Customer Charge or Access Charge is the monthly minimum charge for that electric service. The Customer Charge is designed to help recover the costs of maintaining and operating the electric system. These costs are necessary to make service available on our system – regardless of how much power a consumer uses, or whether they use their service 1 month out of the year or 12 months a year. Currently, not all of SECPA’s fixed costs are recovered in the Customer Charge. A portion of our fixed costs are also recovered in the energy (kWh) charge.

The PCA stands for Power Cost Adjustment. The PCA is being implemented to pass through the wholesale power increase from our power supplier. Our Supplier, Tri-State Generation and Transmission is moving to a rate format that will be evaluated annually and may be increased or decreased annually based on how well that rate covered Tri-State’s costs in the previous year. With the PCA in place, SECPA will be able to pass those increases or decreases on to the members without changing our base rates.

SECPA’s last rate increase was in January of 2015. Since that time SECPA has experienced large increases in the costs of labor, materials, trucks, and other expenses that have made it necessary to increase rates at this time.

Download:

Current & Proposed Rate Schedules

You can call our office to hear about options like budget billing which spreads your payments evenly over the year to avoid high bills during peak usage months. You can also look into resources such as LEAP Colorado Low-income Energy Assistance Program (LEAP) | Colorado Department of Human Services and other energy assistance programs administered by Colorado Energy Outreach at www.energyoutreach.org.