[Politics] The city has approved a CPS Energy customer rebate. Now what?

[Amaterasu イタチ]

 

Following the San Antonio City Council’s approval of the 2023 fiscal year budget Thursday, all CPS Energy customers will be receiving a rebate on either their November or December energy bill — if they choose to take it, that is.

As a result of discourse surrounding the rebate, the utility’s customers will be able to choose if they want to keep the money, pass it on to low-income residents to help pay their energy bills, or see it go toward city weatherization efforts.

The exact amount CPS Energy customers will each be receiving back is about 13% of their July bill. While that will be about $29 for the average residential customer who had a $230 July bill, for 40 large businesses whose July bills averaged $750,000, that means a rebate of roughly $100,000, according to city estimates.
That rebate, which was heavily debated by the City Council over the past month, is coming out of the $75 million in surplus revenue contributed to the city budget by CPS Energy due to an extremely hot summer and high natural gas prices. As a municipally-owned utility, CPS Energy contributes roughly 14% of its gross revenues to the city every year directly into the general fund. 
“This is the first time something like this has happened,” said Chad Hoopingarner, the utility’s vice president of financial planning. “Usually, it’s a one-way revenue stream.”

Now that council has made its decision on what to do with the windfall, the utility can get to work, said CPS Energy President and CEO Rudy Garza. He added that the utility wants to move quickly in establishing how customers can opt out of the rebate, should they choose to, in order to avoid adding it to a customer’s bill one month and then subtracting it again the next month.

“All of this requires effort on CPS Energy’s part to make it happen,” Garza said. “I sat there and wrote out with my team — right after the council vote — five different work streams that we now have to work on to actually get to the point where we can actually implement this.”

About $42.5 million is earmarked to go back to customers via the rebates, while roughly $7.5 million will go toward helping struggling residents through the utility’s Residential Energy Assistance Partnership (REAP) program. Of the $7.5 million, $5.5 million will go toward immediate assistance, and $2 million will go toward future assistance. The rest will remain in the city budget for climate resiliency efforts and sidewalks.

The rebate will be a welcome reprieve for many customers who have been struggling in the wake of the pandemic, Garza said. The utility is owed roughly $165 million in delinquent accounts, he said, so the $7.5 million from council and any returned rebates will be welcome aid to them.

 

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