Carolyn Yeago couldn’t figure it out. The Atlanta resident is a biomedical scientist, and no stranger to complex problems. But one thing she didn’t know how to calculate was her Georgia Power bill.
Yeago is on Georgia Power’s Overnight Advantage plan, designed for customers who, like her, own an electric vehicle or have other batteries to charge. It offers a lower rate between 11pm and 7am, encouraging EV owners to plug in their cars when demand for electricity is otherwise low. In Georgia Power parlance, that period is “super off-peak.” There is also “off-peak” (7 am to 2 pm, then again from 7 pm to 11 pm) and “peak” – the height of the day, when electricity is most expensive. (Those three periods only apply from June to September; the rest of the year it’s just off-peak and super off-peak.)
A standard Georgia Power bill for residential customers lists a “current service” line, which is the main charge, reflecting electricity usage in the past billing period, followed by a few lines for various fees and sales taxes. “Where I got completely confused is actually calculating your current service,” Yeago said. “What I did is multiply my usage hours by their rate number, from the rate plan, and add it up. And it is not equal to your current service charge. It is significantly less.”
However, the “current service” line does not only reflect the usage rate. There is also a “basic service fee,” billed as a fixed rate per day. So Yeago added it. “And there’s still a contradiction,” she said. When everything was added up with the fees and taxes, the number was lower than the one listed at the bottom of her bill – the one she had to pay.
Her concerns echoed others expressed by readers to Grist, ie working on a project to demystify energy and electricity policy in Georgia. Through conversations with community members across metro Atlanta, in Rome, in Augusta and in Macon, the most common question was: How do I understand my power bill?
Here’s a breakdown of all the costs, explicit and implicit, that make up a typical monthly electricity bill for Georgia residents.
RATE PLANS
Georgia Power offers seven different rate plans, including Overnight benefit, FlatBill (a fixed monthly amount, averaged over 12 months), and Smart use (incentivizing customers to keep demand low by, for example, using no more than one large appliance within a given 60-minute period).
However, these are outliers. The vast majority of customers sign up for the Residential Service Plan, in which kilowatt-hour rates change on a schedule based on the time of year and — in the summer — how much electricity your household uses each month. (The first 650 kWh are charged at a certain rate, and then the cost goes up in increments.) But while Yeago’s Overnight Advantage plan differs a bit in terms of how the kWh charges break down, the rest of these bill the same as you’ll find in other residential service plans. So if you’re a Georgia Power customer, your bill probably looks a lot like this one.
Here’s what’s on Carolyn Yeago’s account:
Carolyn Yeago’s Georgia Power bill as of July 2024
CURRENT SERVICE
As Yeago noted, there are two primary components to this line. One is the basic monthly charge — a flat rate of $0.4603 per day, which covers costs of meter installation and maintenance — plus a charge based on household usage.
But the “current service” line also reflects other fees that aren’t specifically broken out on the bill — the source of Yeago’s confusion.
What else does current service consist of?
FUEL CHARGE
It’s a “rider” — an additional fee — that is folded into the overall “current service” line on the monthly electricity bill, and not specifically broken out. By law, Georgia Power is allowed to recoup all costs it spends on fuel – coal, natural gas, uranium for nuclear power, and so on. Natural gas makes up 48% of Georgia Power’s fuel mix. As fuel costs, especially natural gas, have risen in recent years, so has this portion of customers’ bills. The charge is billed per kilowatt-hour, with different rates at different times of the year: It costs more from June to September (currently 4.5876 cents per kWh) than it does from October to May (4.2859 cents). Since this bill is from July, Yeago paid the higher rate; multiplied by her total consumption of 1,862 kWh, that would have accounted for about $85 of her bill.
DEMAND HIS DRIVING SCHEDULE
This one covers administrative costs associated with residential energy efficiency programs. It is assessed as a percentage of the base bill – that is, the basic service charge plus daily usage.
ENVIRONMENTAL COMPLIANCE COSTS
According to Georgia Power, this fee is to “recover capital costs and operation and maintenance costs associated with government-mandated environmental costs.” In other words, it covers climate-friendly initiatives required by the federal mandate, such as scrubbers on coal plants; it also covers cleanup costs associated with coal ash, a byproduct of combustion. The Public Service Commission allowed Georgia Power to pass on the cost of coal ash cleanup, which is required by law, to customers. Currently, environmental compliance costs are calculated to be just under 12 percent of the base bill; of that, according to the PSC, about 17 percent goes to coal ash cleanup.
CORE CONSTRUCTION COST REPORT
It was added to customers’ bills to help finance the construction of Units 3 and 4 at Plant Vogtle—the controversial nuclear power plant near Augusta. This charge appeared from 2011 to spring 2024 and added on average between $4 and $8 to the typical account. Now that those units are operational, the fee is no longer collected — and so, despite the line item, there is no actual charge on Yeago’s account. The costs for Units 3 and 4 are now rolled into the current service charge.
MUNICIPAL FRANCHISE FEE
Franchise fees are the money utilities pay to local governments for the use and maintenance of public rights-of-way, such as roads and other public spaces. Depending on where they live, Georgia Power customers pay either an in-city limit fee or an out-of-town limit fee, with the former being a little higher.
SALES TAX
Georgia’s standard 4 percent tax added to all retail sales, plus any applicable local taxes; in this case it still means about 7.4 percent.
Factoring in all these various fees – especially those embedded in the “current service” line – made it possible for Carolyn Yeago to get much closer to the total that appeared on her bill. One of the biggest surprises? The fuel charge. “When I googled ‘fuel recycling,’ all the articles I found said something like, it costs the average customer $15,” she said. However, one of those articles was from early 2023, and fuel costs have risen repeatedly since then: 12 percent in June 2023 alone. Last year, the increased fuel surcharge added an extra $16 to an average customer’s bill. She knew fuel was part of the bill, Yeago said. “I just didn’t realize how much higher it was.”
In the spring of 2024, these prices led some Georgia lawmakers to propose legislation that would require Georgia Power provide specific information on fuel prices on customers’ bills, broken down by fuel type: coal, natural gas, nuclear and solar. The company opposed the measure, saying its accounts and its website already provide that type of data. Still, taxpayers like Yeago say more information wouldn’t be a bad thing. “It’s such a challenge because I feel like if they’re going to offer all these different plans, they need to give the customer a way to determine which plan is best for them,” she said.
It was compiled with help from the Southface Institute, an Atlanta-based sustainability think tank with many resources for understanding utility payments.
