An Open Letter to the Membership Concerning Higher Power Costs for This Winter!
from General Manager, Mark Boyd

Greetings to all the Bowie-Cass membership. I hope this letter finds each of you well! The last two years have certainly been challenging on multiple levels from personal to global. Throughout these challenging times, your Cooperative has worked to uphold our mission of providing safe, reliable and affordable electric service to our members. We now find ourselves with a new challenge concerning power costs as we move forward. You can go to almost any news source you like and energy providers are warning it will be more expensive to heat our homes this winter regardless of the fuel source.

For the past few years, the membership has enjoyed very favorable & stable power costs. We had a stretch from May of 2017 through September of 2019 where we didn’t have to make an adjustment to our Power Cost Recovery Factor (PCRF). This is the portion of your bill that makes up the difference between what is in our rate base and the actual price of our wholesale power.  NOTE: power cost is always a pass-through cost. Whatever our wholesale provider charges, we pass along to you the member. After this long stretch of consistent power cost we actually saw a decline due to the abundance of natural gas, lower transmission costs and other favorable variables. This allowed us to take the PCRF down as low as $.0225/kwh. Unfortunately those variables have now changed and not in our favor.  (continued)