Pennsylvania PUC Approves New Assignment of Costs to POR Discount Rate

The Pennsylvania PUC has approved the assignment of new costs to the electric purchase of receivables discount rate at PECO.

Specifically, the PECO POR discount rate may now include a portion of the costs to implement a remote account number access tool, which allows customers to look-up their account number remotely and to enroll with electric suppliers in situations in which customers are not carrying their bill.

Though in its order directing EDCs to implement the account number look-up mechanisms the PUC suggested a user-fee to pay for any costs, the PUC approved PECO's alternate proposal to recover one-half of costs from suppliers through the POR discount, and one-half from default service customers via the bypassable Generation Supply Adjustment.

"While the Commission proposed that EDCs' consider implementing a user-fee based cost recovery mechanism, this is not the only reasonable method to recover these costs. Upon review, we agree with PECO's assertion that, at present and without adequate usage history, such a mechanism may not guarantee full recovery of costs as there is too much uncertainty as to how often the account lookup mechanism will be used. Given these circumstances, we agree with PECO's proposal to have a portion of its costs recovered from EGSs operating in its service territory, as it is the only method currently demonstrated to allow PECO to fully recover its costs for the account lookup mechanism and assign a portion of the costs to EGSs who will benefit from it. Accordingly, we will approve PECO's proposed cost recovery mechanism," the PUC said

The PUC denied a protest from Dominion Retail, which had argued that the socialized recovery of the marketing costs of certain suppliers, whose business model requires the use of the account number look-up tool, via the POR discount paid by all suppliers is anti-competitive

PECO was directed to implement the account number look-up tool by November 1, 2014.