Seasonal rates are ending

The OEB decided that the delivery rates charged to seasonal customers are subsidized by other customers and don’t reflect the actual cost to serve them.

Read the OEB's Decision here. To learn more about seasonal rates ending, visit the OEB’s website.

Seasonal customers don’t qualify for Rural or Remote Rate Protection that reduces the monthly service charge by $60.50 per month. This government subsidy only applies to year-round residential customers living at their principal residence.

As well, seasonal customers aren’t eligible for the government subsidy — Distribution Rate Protection — which caps the service charge and volume charge to a maximum amount of $38.08 per month.

The increase in charges also better reflects the higher cost to serve customers in low density areas.

To ease the impact to our customers, we’ll gradually increase your service charge over the next 10 years. This approach will limit the total bill increase to no more than 10% per year (excluding very low users of electricity).

If you’re moving to Low Density rates, you’ll receive a letter in December 2022 that will show your estimated bill impacts.

We’ll gradually phase in the increase to protect customers from seeing large bill increases. Your service charge that’s included in your delivery rates will be slowly increased on a yearly basis. This increase will be offset by a lower distribution volume charge each year.

We won’t make any additional revenue from ending seasonal rates. This change only impacts how overall costs are recovered between residential customers.

Most seasonal customers are currently billed quarterly. We’ll continue to bill seasonal customers on a quarterly basis. If you prefer to receive a monthly bill, you may sign up for our budget billing program.

If your seasonal property is your principal residence, you’ll need to fill out a declaration form to acknowledge that you live at the residence at least four days a week for eight months of the year and provide a copy of your driver’s licence that shows your address for this residence.

• We confirmed the location of your seasonal property and compared it with the number of customers who are near you and the power lines and other equipment that deliver power to you.

• We counted the number of electricity customers within your community or area, and length of power lines serving that area. We then follow the OEB’s criteria for Urban, Medium, or Low Density, to finalize your rate classification.

• We use our geographic information system (GIS) to identify and mark the boundaries of core clusters of customers.

• Once density zone boundaries are marked, we extended out the customer cluster boundary in all directions to easily identifiable physical or geographical boundaries (such as roads, railways, rivers, lakes) or non-physical boundaries identifiable within the GIS system (such as property lines), where physical boundaries are remotely located from customer clusters.

• Customer clusters located close to each other are combined into a larger, single density zone.

• We map the kilometre of power line within a proposed density zone boundary and calculate the number of customers per kilometre of power line. Based on this we can confirm the correct rate class for customers located in the density zone boundary.

As your rate class has changed, we need to calculate your Delivery charges using Low Density rates for any usage on and after January 1, 2023. Your Delivery charges shown on page 3 are calculated using Seasonal rates for any usage incurred in 2022.