February electrical rates rise across isles

Residential electrical rates on Oahu will rise in February from January in large part because a coal-fired plant that provides the island’s cheapest source of power was taken down for maintenance, Hawaiian Electric Co. officials said Friday.

The 180-megawatt plant in Campbell Industrial Park operated by independent power producer AES Corp. has the capacity to provide about 15 percent of the island’s peak electricity demand. The cost to produce electricity at the AES plant is about 9 cents a kilowatt-hour versus about 23 cents a kilowatt-hour for power produced by the oil-burning plants that provide the bulk of HECO’s electricity generation.

A similar temporary spike in monthly rates occurred a year ago when the AES power plant was taken offline for maintenance.

A bill for a typical Oahu household using 600 kilowatt-hours of electricity a month will rise to $217.36 in February from $211.22 in January, according to HECO. HECO is charging 34.7 cents a kilowatt-hour for electricity this month, up from 33.7 cents a kilowatt-hour in January. In February 2013 the rate was 34.5 cents a kilowatt-hour.

Electrical rates also will rise this month from January in Maui and Hawaii counties. Those increases were primarily the result in increased costs of fuel oil, which is the main source of power generation for both the HECO companies and the Kauai Island Utility Cooperative.

Maui Electric Co. customers will see their rate rise to 37.2 cents per kilowatt-hour this month from 36.7 cents in January.

Hawaii island’s residential rate will rise to 40.6 cents a kilowatt-hour from last month’s 39.5 cents.

On Kauai the rate is unchanged at 42.3 cents per kilowatt-hour.

Hawaii has the highest electrical rates in the nation. The statewide average of 37.2 cents a kilowatt-hour in December was triple the national average of 12.1 cents a kilowatt-hour, according to the most recent numbers available from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Okla­homa, which uses natural gas to generate most of its electricity, had the lowest average electrical rate at 8.1 cents a kilowatt-hour.