Hundreds of thousands of Oregonians who pay Portland General Electric for electricity could see their bills rise next year under a new rate proposal from the state’s largest private electric utility.
PGE announced Friday they would seek approval from the Oregon Public Utility Commission — a three-person governor-appointed group charged with regulating the rates of privately owned electric and gas companies in the state — for a nearly 5% overall rate increase across customer classes.
Residential customers would see a nearly 4% increase, which would add an average of about $8 to monthly bills by July 1, 2027. It is the eighth year in a row the utility has raised customer rates, which are today collectively up 50% for residential customers from just five years ago.
It comes in the wake of Pacific Power, the state’s second largest electric utility, announcing they would seek a nearly 9% overall rate increase for customers in 2027.
PGE said in a news release the increases are needed to replace and upgrade infrastructure such as utility poles, customer meters, distribution equipment and transmission lines to reduce outages and improve reliability.
A spokesperson for the Oregon Citizens’ Utility Board, a watchdog group that represents the interests of utility consumers, said that PGE’s residential rates are still inexplicably higher than the national average.
“For many customers, PGE’s rates are not affordable, and this increase will only make it worse. While the increase itself is not big on its own, it’s also coming on top of a 5% increase this April and nearly 50% between 2021-2025,” Charlotte Shuff, outreach and communications director for the group, wrote in an email.
Drew Hanson, a spokesperson for PGE, told the Capital Chronicle that the company is also proposing a nearly 8% rate hike on large-scale data centers, who under the 2025 POWER Act were made a separate rate class responsible for footing the costs of infrastructure and new energy generation they require. Earlier this year, PGE under the new regulations raised rates on its data center customers nearly 30%.
Schuff said even with PGE’s improved assignment of data center costs to data centers, “CUB continues to believe that PGE assigns too much of its overall costs to residential customers.”
Originally published on oregoncapitalchronicle.com, part of the BLOX Digital Content Exchange.
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