Unravelling the Mysteries of the Utilities Board Process

Yukon Energy and the Yukon Electrical Company Limited have filed a joint Phase II Application to our regulator, the Yukon Utilities Board. Before your eyes glaze over, let us explain what a Phase II Application is and why this might be important to you.

You might remember that in 2008 and 2009 each utility went to the Utilities Board separately for what are known as revenue requirement hearings. This process allows the YUB to determine how much money each company needs to operate and what the overall amount is that can be charged to customers for electricity.

During the Phase II hearings, the Utilities Board uses the information from the Revenue Requirement Hearings to do a couple of things:

• It recommends how much of that overall amount is to be allocated to each class of customer (resident, small business, government and industry). In other words, the YUB decides who pays for what amount of the pie. You might not know that while business and industry now pay 100 percent of what it costs to provide them with power, residential customers currently only pay about 70 percent of the true cost of their power. They are subsidized by the government, which pays 130 percent of the cost.
  
  
• It recommends how the rates within each class should be designed. For example, the Utilities Board could determine that people who use under a certain amount of electricity per month should get a reduction on their bill while those using a lot of electricity each month should pay a higher rate. That already happens to a certain extent, but Yukon Energy and Yukon Electrical Company Ltd. are asking that there be even more incentives for people to conserve electricity.

The Phase II hearing will also deal with proposed changes to the terms under which the utilities provide service to customers. This covers everything from rights of the utility to access land (such as when a linesperson has to go onto private property to access transmission lines) to the rights of a customer to have their meter tested, as well as the level of service fees.

If you want to know more, the entire Phase II hearing application can be found on our web site. As always, if you have questions, please send them our way and we will do our best to answer them.