CUC claims to offer value for money to customers
Caribbean Utilities Company
(CNS): More than half of residential customers’ electricity bills in December were under $200, according to Grand Cayman’s electricity supplier, which said in a statement issued yesterday that it provides customers with a reliable service and good value for money. Pointing to lower oil prices bringing down bills, CUC said there was a perception that all power bills in Cayman are extremely high but with the fuel factor falling and further duty cuts from government, customers can expect even lower bills over the coming months.
CUC is required to submit information regarding its fuel costs and its calculation of the per kWh rate it charges to the Electricity Regulatory Authority (ERA) in advance of billing customers. CUC said the fuel costs are recovered from electricity consumers two months in arrears to allow for a thorough review process by the ERA. This means fuel costs incurred in October were billed to consumers in December.
The Fuel Cost Charge that will appear on customer’s January 2016 bills is $0.13 per kwh but bills will fall further when the 25 cents government reduction in fuel duty is passed through in March.
“Customers across Grand Cayman continue to pay less for electricity. That’s because they are enjoying the benefit of lower fuel costs resulting from reduced global fuel prices. The average price per Imperial Gallon of fuel decreased 32% to $2.15 at the end of December when compared to $3.16 for the same period in 2014. Fuel costs are passed through to customers by CUC on a two-month lag basis with no mark-up,” company officials stated.
For the three months that ended in December the reduced fuel costs translated to an average Fuel Cost Charge rate of $0.15 per kilowatt-hour for residential consumers, compared to an average of $0.23 during the last quarter of 2014. Officals said that equated to a fall of about $85 for customers using a 1,000 kWh a month
CUC’s President and CEO Richard Hew said the power firm was pleased customers were benefitting from lower fuel costs but he said the company was still pushing towards alternative energy sources to improve overall plant fuel efficiency.
“This includes the 5 megawatt (MW) Solar Project in Bodden Town which is on schedule to start operations in October this year, the Customer Renewable Energy (CORE) programme, which is nearing 4 MW, and the installation of our 39.7 MW diesel plant in June 2016, which comprises the most fuel efficient diesel generators in the Caribbean,” he said, adding that the firm encourages customers to take steps to reduce their energy usage.
CUC press release 19Jan2016 – Electricity Customers Benefit from Low Fuel Prices
Category: Local News
I would highly recommend that all customers with a smart meter register at the below website and see your daily comsumption and confirm if it all makes sense.
https://cucconnect.cuc.ky/CC/connect/registration/metersense/RegistrationForm.xml
Interesting comment from Mr Hew about their recent purchase of, “the most fuel efficient diesel generators in the Caribbean.” The key word is ‘diesel’ because fuel efficient is a relative term and while the generators themselves may make the best possible use of the fuel they burn are they really the most cost effective method of supplying us with power?
One of the big failings at CUC over the years is that they only seem to equate generating electricity with burning diesel fuel and so reject any thoughts of moving on from what is in reality still little more than 1950s technology. They can make all the excuses in the world for this but the fact is that they could have diversified their investments as alternative options became available and created a truly efficient power generation service but they chose not to and now we are all paying for that decision.
Read this and weep!
Had an email from a friend in the UK who is following this story. His electricity supplier, German-based Eon, just contacted him to offer a lower over-60s fixed-rate tariff than the one he’s currently on.
The annual electricity bill for his bungalow currently works out around £650 (CI$764) and that covers everything including his heating. Out of this £440 (CI$517) is covered by various age-related grants and rebates leaving him to pay about £200 (CI$235) a year.
On the new tariff he’s going to pay £475 a year – you do the math on that! After the deductions his monthly bills for the next year will be roughly the cost of couple of a cold beers. He joked that if he now installed solar panels and sold the surplus back into the grid Eon would end paying him.
Sure, and the snow storm about to hit the US East Coast will actually dump purple snow instead of white snow……..
Ha ha that explains it why my December bill still hasn’t been posted to my online cuc account yet.
Seriously CUC always posted the bill on 10th of every month, as of today 0.00 balance.
Maybe Mr. Hew need to get those lenses adjusted.
Yeah thanks CUC..Oil has gone down by over 80% and your average fuel charge has gone down by 30…thanks for nothing
CUC and Hew are a joke about value for money.
CUC should stop guessing how much electricity a household uses and go out and check the meters like they did years ago.
I never see any CUC employee out reading the meters.
Employing meter readers will increase your costs.
Not to worry folks, we’re going to have DOZENS of free, pure, clean energy device inventions that the entire world should have been benefiting from one hundred years ago if it weren’t for the murderous fossil fuel elite finally coming on line IN THE YEAR OF 2016 (two thousand and sixteen) A.D. THEN we will finally get a chance to see how fair CUC’s rates are.
So gas stations are making $1.75 cents per gallon on diesel. Whoa that is a 85%profit at todays diesel. In october diesel was selling for around $4.30 cents. That 100% profit. It nothing back greed.
Mr. KT when will gas be below $3.00? Snòoòooòzèeeeeee.
La La land!
besides the obviously laughable remarks of offering “value for money” – their customer service is some of the worst in the world.
Quality customer service comes at a price, which would in turn need to be passed down to the customer. Suck it up.
They need to expand the renewable energy program! So we can have an option
The race for renewable energy has passed a turning point. The world is now adding more capacity for renewable power each year than coal, natural gas, and oil combined. And there’s no going back.
The electricity system is shifting to clean, despite the change in oil and gas prices there is going to be a substantial buildout of renewable energy that is likely to be an order of magnitude larger than the buildout of coal and gas.
The price of wind and solar power continues to plummet, and is now on par or cheaper than grid electricity in many areas of the world. Solar, the newest major source of energy in the mix, makes up less than 10 percent of the electricity market today but could be the world’s biggest single source by 2050, according to the International Energy Agency.
The question is no longer if the world will transition to cleaner energy, but how long it will take.
The longer we wait to make a transition, the more difficult and costly it is likely to be. It will take both money and ENERGY—nature does offer a financing package for energy, we will need the energy upfront. If we wait too long, energy may be the very resource we find in shortest supply.
Assuming that’s CI$200, consider this – my brother’s December electricity bill in the UK was £56 or CI$65. He’s all-electric so that’s paying for everything and it’s the middle of winter over there. His usage was just under 600 kWh but 75% of that (mostly heating and hot water) was supplied at an off-peak rate. He works from home and the low consumption during peak periods is down to the use of energy efficient equipment in a properly insulated building.
Where he lives they have wind turbines, solar farms and privately-owned solar panels feeding into the grid with the main power supply coming from a 420MW combined cycle gas turbine/steam turbine station powered by natural gas. Another similar 325MW station in the area was mothballed in 2012 as input from the alternative energy sources, particularly solar, grew. The one thing they don’t use is diesel because it’s expensive and dirty.
If they can efficiently use solar energy like this in England what the heck are CUC playing at?
I suspect one of the reasons CUC can’t offer multi-rate tariffs like they do in the UK is the way they generate power. When you run a bank of small generators like Sparky’s Drive they can simply be turned on and off to meet demand so there is no off-peak surplus, the fuel burn per kWh is roughly the same at 1am as it is at 1pm. I don’t know much about the industry but you do have to wonder whether CUC’s piecemeal approach to expanding output isn’t part of the problem here.
Based on experience in Grenada a natural gas-powered 400MW power plant can be built for under CI$200 million. It makes more sense to me for CUC to use two or three large natural gas powered generators backed up by the widespread introduction of solar panels than spend $85million adding two more diesel generators that produce less than 40MW.
Right up to the point when the LNG generator goes off line and CUC looses a huge percentage of its capacity at a stroke. Passing lightly over the costs of installing an LNG supply and storage system.
Jotnar
You must work for CUC because that’s the same daft line of argument they always come with about alternative energy – solar power’s no good because the sun doesn’t shine at night and wind power doesn’t work because the wind doesn’t blow 24/7/365.
The $200million quoted apparently included the required LNG storage facility. As for the system going off-line? If CUC had invested in two 200-300MW generators rather than building capacity up piecemeal they’d not only have back up and surplus capacity to offer off-peak rates but their fuel burn would way less. In fact CUC’s mixture of small generators are probably more vulnerable to downtime than two large units because the maintenance requirements are more complex. I lived on another island in this region where they run the whole system on two turbine generators and, apart from shut downs for routine servicing, they lost just 10 hours output in first decade of operation. Mind you their company motto was something like ‘If you look after it, it will look after you’ and they had maintenance standards to match that.
Bluntly, paying $85million to generate just 40MW is a pretty good explanation of why power is so expensive here. It’s got nothing to with fuel costs, this is simply a lack of joined up thinking when it comes to investment by a monopoly that knows they can pass 100% of their outgoings onto the consumer. If there was scope for competition here (and I admit there probably isn’t) CUC would have to be a lot more careful how they spent what is after all our money.
Think for a minute. They are guaranteed a rate of return on capital investment. So they have an incentive to pay as much as they can get away with for generators, because it all makes more profit for them.
Wait, a further 25c reduction in fuel duty? When was that announced?
CUC provide a first world service which costs in a remote island. They do a fantastic job and I do not begrudge the bills.
That’s just about the funniest comment I’ve seen posted this year 🙂
No I mean it. When in the height of summer one is stuck in a place fit for reptiles alone, the spending on a/c is worth every cent.
3:46 You clearly don’t know what ‘the height of summer’ really means. The climate in the Cayman Islands is fairly mild compared to some of the places I’ve worked in. In fact I rarely feel the need to use a/c here.
Unless you are an iguana, you have had to live in some really awful places then. But you are an example to those moaning about A/C costs, since that is an optional luxury. Personally I set my bedrooms to a sweet 67 degrees.
Funniest comment? I’d say it’s the most ridiculous.
@12:38 – you obviously have no idea what the word ‘remote’ actually means.
Mr Hew claims that CUC, “encourages customers to take steps to reduce their energy usage.” I assume by that he means the ‘Energy Smart’ pages of their website.
There are two problems with this. The first is that CUC aren’t actually telling us anything that hasn’t been available on 100s of other websites for 10 years or more. The second is that CIG, who could offer duty incentives to import energy saving equipment and beef up the building codes to make new properties more energy efficient, seem to be making no effort to support any of these recommendations.
Once again it’s a token gesture that doesn’t show any real commitment to anything apart from lining shareholders’ pockets at the expense of the rest of us.
CNS, for the love of God, please provide some kind of cautionary warning before publishing things like CUC providing “value for money” for us to read – I myself almost ended up in emergency having had an apoplectic fit when I read it and my blood pressure still hasn’t returned to normal. Thank you.
What exactly are you smoking, friend?
Blimey, thought I’d posted this inquiry in response to the “remote island” one, but it ended up underneath my own (!) – which gave me a good laugh and did reduce my blood pressure, thank goodness. The Lord works in mysterious ways for sure!
Mr.Hew, you ever wondered – if it is indeed true, which I seriously question – why this “more than half” is the case? Maybe it’s because we all can’t afford to use your product at the present rip off rates you are shaking down the public every month for. You ever thought about that?
Excuse me, what the heck is Mr.Hew talking about? CUC have been ripping off the public for donkey’s years and he has the audacity to talk about “value for money”? CUC don’t offer any more “value for money” than Cable and Wireless did before they were provided with some competition. You all remember? Look, sportsfan, quit taking us all for a bunch of fools and stop the price gouging, okay?
And cable and wireless is still running from their brand. Normall a brand name is a valuable thing. They keep changing their name. Why? Ha ha ha
They’re trying to stay in the flow. Looks like their srevice went over the falls this time around.
$2.15 an imperial gallon ??!!! I will take that.
I think my head just fell off from laughing too much and I may have peed my pants too.
Interesting $2.15 a gallon…well well well, what do our petrol importers say to that? Nearly 100% mark up. Really?
Which 1/2 of Cayman they talking about ?
The 1/2 that got their electricity cut off for not paying their bills? Or maybe its those around Cayman who had 8hr+ power cuts for days? I wonder if anyone who lost all their groceries got any credit off their bill? What bunch of complete a**holes.
The other half is Dead KMT
HaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHa….
..wake me up when this wet dream is over.
A little “mark up” here and a little “mark up” there and the customer will never notice that CUC fattened up the nottom line and the payout to shareholders.
Time for a first class cocktail party……. .rember to invite the Governor.
Maybe a raise or two at the top. We dont want that year end profit to be too high……… the customer may catch on.
Now CUC… PROVE IT to the public. Show us the proof!!!
This can only raise a hollow laugh.
Has there ever been a company so rapacious, and so contemptuous of its customers’ interests?
We urgently need a statutory check on CUC’s habit of disconnecting customers’ supply at the drop of a hat. Same for the water authority as well.
Would the “drop of the hat” be non-payment for products already consumed? If you had a restuarant and I came in every day for a month and comsumed your food, then did not promptly settle my account FULLY at the end of the month, would you let me back in during the following month to repeat the process?
No, but I might go to another restaurant? Unfortunately we don’t have that option and have to abide by our local outdated piracy laws when it comes to electricity. Are CUC planning on using the same plan until all coal, gas and everything else runs out in the world? Probably so right?
“Has there ever been a company….”
Yes! Cable and Wireless er I mean Lime uh oh I mean Flow oops I mean Thelma…..
Then there was careless and wutless. I think that one is coming back next.