If you have been on social media platforms like Facebook or NextDoor recently you might have seen some local Carroll County folks (or others in our general area) talking about their rising BGE bills. I have noticed the rising costs with our home bills (December and January are the two highest BGE bills we have ever had in this home).
I decided to look into the data a bit to break it down for the followers of The Observer. I downloaded every bill from December 2022 to January 2024 to see what has changed. WOW have things changed (or a better way to say it is that rates have INCREASED).
Here is the analysis of BGE bills over time:
The first thing I wanted to see was how much have the “Electric Supply” rates changed over the past year. Here is a breakdown of the changes from January 2023 to January 2024:
Every category of “Electric Supply” costs have increased nearly 21% over the past year…no matter what times you use power (Peak, Intermediate or Off Peak times).
What does this mean in terms of money? I came up with a winter scenario of electric usage for a home using 1900 kWh for the month at different usage times.
For this scenario you can see that this part of your BGE bill would be increased by 20.71% and what would have been a $186.19 charge on your bill in 2023 is now a $224.75 charge on your bill in 2024.
But we are not done yet. There are other increases to your bill in 2024.
There is the “BGE Electric Delivery” section of your BGE bill. Here is a look at the increases from 2023 to 2024:
As you can see above there are some pretty significant jumps in this “delivery” fee from BGE this year.
What does this mean in terms of money? I used the same scenario of electric usage for a home using 1900 kWh for the month to show what this costs in 2024 vs what it did cost in 2023:
The “Customer Charge” fee of $12 is a flat fee and has remained the same. The other two charges “EmPower MD Chg” and “Distribution Chg” have increased and overall this is an 11.62% increase with this scenario.
Now if you add the increases in “Electric Supply” and “BGE Electric Delivery” from the scenarios above…this is what you get:
So a bill based on usage in January 2023 of $284.02 is now costing you $333.95…nearly $50 more (or a 17.85% increase).
The final piece of your BGE bill is “Taxes and Fees”. This has not changed much from 2023 to 2024:
Using the scenario of 1900 kWh above the Taxes and Fees would only increase by $0.01.
As noted earlier in this article this information (rate changes) was taken from an actual BGE bill like this one:
The other thing I noticed on the bills as a pretty big increase in usage noted from BGE (looking at Dec 2023/Jan 2024 vs Dec 2022/Jan 2023). Now I do not have a good explanation of this yet as nothing (from an electric perspective) has changed over the past year in the house so that is something I need to look further into for our household. I will tell you I went and reprogrammed all of the thermostats down a few degrees right away last night.
The scenario of usage above is well below the numbers for our household as our bill in January was near $500 (which is crazy in my opinion). I just thought I would pick a range of numbers for the example that I hope many folks could identify with for this article.
The rising costs of gasoline, food, and essential items for all households today is up so this BIG jump in electric bills from BGE is just another hit on household budgets.
I want to bring this back around to a regular topic here on The Observer…potential tax increases from Carroll County Government. I have a feeling that tax increases (on local property taxes and/or income taxes) will be discussed as part of the FY25 budget process.
My thoughts on tax increases today: My hope is that the Commissioners understand that another hit on household budgets in the current economy is not what many folks are going to want to hear or see this year. I fully understand the position County Government is in with their budget (some of which they did to themselves over the years)…but if the residents of the county are cutting back because of rising costs…maybe the County should consider the same options prior to “charging” the residents more when our personal or household budgets are getting stretched thin by all of the other factors of the economy.
It will not be long before our Commissioners finally begin to discuss the FY25 budget in public sessions (looks like March 5th really starts the process). Here is a look at the upcoming schedule for the FY25 budget.
This has been my experience with BGE bills and my thoughts on potential tax increases. I am always curious what others in our community think (or have experienced with your BGE bills).
- Have you noticed a similar increase in BGE rates on your household bills?
- Are you seeing a higher usage this year vs last year (you can see the numbers on the top of page 2 of your BGE bill)?
- Is anyone considering looking at options other than BGE for electricity? If so…let me know what you have found for residents of the county.
- Given the economy we are in, what are your thoughts about potential tax increases by County Government?
Let me know in the comments here or on social media.
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