NV Energy is asking to delaying its demand charge.
The utility made the request to the Public Utilities Commission to delay the implementation of its residential daily demand charge to Oct. 1 in a Tuesday filing. Originally, the demand charge would have been added to customers’ bills on April 1.
“Postponing the implementation of daily demand is the right decision for our customers,” Brandon Barkhuff, NV Energy president and CEO, said in a press release Wednesday. “This additional time will allow us to provide customers with personalized information and practical tools so they can better understand how their energy use affects their bill before daily demand takes effect.”
In October, NV Energy will become the first investor-owned utility to impose a mandatory demand charge on residential and small commercial customers. Currently, only larger customers like casinos have to pay demand charges.
The idea of the demand charge is to offset the cost borne from serving net metering customers. Between 2018 and 2024, the total cost shift borne by non-rooftop solar customers in Southern Nevada was $424 million, a utility spokesperson told the Las Vegas Review-Journal last year.
Solar customers cannot use net metering credits to offset the cost of the demand charge and will see an around $12 increase in their bill, according to the utility. The utility says non-solar customers’ average monthly bill should remain the same or slightly lower if their behavior does not change.
“The demand charge helps fix an inequity between rooftop solar customers and non-rooftop solar customers by ensuring everyone contributes fairly to the grid we all rely on,” said NV Energy in a statement from November.
What is NV Energy’s demand charge?
The demand charge would be mandatory for all residential and small business customers.
The Sept. 16 approval of the demand charge creates a two-pronged approach to billing customers each month: how many kilowatts a customer used during their highest 15-minute period of usage combined with the typical per kilowatt hours used each month.
NV Energy has proposed a 14-cent per kilowatt demand charge. Therefore, if a customer uses 2 kilowatts during their 15-minute peak, the demand charge for that day will be 28 cents. All daily demand charges will be added up at the end of the month and applied to the customer’s bill.
The per kilowatt hour charge will go down in October to account for the cost of the demand charge.
Consumer, BCP pushback
Since its approval by the PUC in September, NV Energy has been faced with confusion and pushback on the daily demand charge from consumers and advocacy groups.
Most notably, the Attorney General’s Bureau of Consumer Protection has continued to fight back on the new way of billing, calling it unlawful. The bureau claims the demand charge would be a time-of-use rate, which would violate Nevada law.
The BCP filed a petition with the commission in October, to which the regulatory body denied, calling the demand charge “an imperfect solution,” but will give “customers another tool to make their bills more affordable.”
In December, the bureau filed a petition for judicial review in the Clark County District Court in another attempt to overturn it. It has seen little movement in court, and the case is still pending.
An NV Energy spokesperson said the postponement is not tied to the judicial review and the utility is “focusing on customers and making sure that the right tools are in place to help them understand how daily demand works.”
Contact Emerson Drewes at edrewes@reviewjournal.com. Follow @EmersonDrewes on X.
