Portland General Electric to hike rates 18 percent come January 2024
With approval from the Oregon Public Utility Commission (OPUC), Portland General Electric (PGE) announced this week that effective January 2024 a new general rate increase and power cost would affect all of its customers.
It will be a sizable increase, amounting to an anticipated 18 percent for residential customers when coupled with earlier rate decisions. For commercial and industrial customers the hike will be somewhat lower, at 14.4 percent and 11.6 percent, respectively. There will also be some variance depending on customer class and energy usage.
“PGE understands the impact of price increases on our customers given rising costs across many aspects of Oregonians’ lives,” PGE said in a statement. “These new rates take into account inflation and power costs, upgrades to the grid and investments focused on increased resiliency, security and reliability for all customers.”
Final rates could be slightly more or less than the above, though, as OPUC still needs to act on other filings by the end of the year.
When discussing the work that led to these rates, PGE pointed to the undergrounding of more than 100 miles of new distribution power lines for safety, trimming more than 3,700 miles of vegetation, adding fire-resistant poles and expanding into AI-equipped cameras for quicker hazard detection, among other things.
