New approaches to power supply

The Regulated Industries Commission (RIC) has called on TTEC to reduce its costs by $2.2 billion.

In urging TTEC's officials to return to their spreadsheets, the RIC sent a welcome signal that it would not be solving its balance sheet imbalance by throwing more taxpayer money at the problem.

A rate increase is inevitable, but the rate increases proposed by the RIC are surprising, provoking comment by the Opposition and OWTU.

The price increases range between 15 per cent and 64 per cent, but don't follow the electricity use in a linear way.

Residences that consume 400 kilowatt hours (KWh) on TTEC's bi-monthly billing cycle will see the lowest increase in the suggested regime, while households using 500 KWh and 1,500 KWh will face the next lowest rise at 19 per cent.

Proposed pricing rises to 31 per cent for users drawing 2,500 KWh and 64 per cent for users using 7,000 KWh.

Those are sharp increases and demand some explanation of how they were formulated and how targeted households will support such increases.

The RIC noted that it had done some of these models for households, and the regulatory agency must share these findings with the public.

As a monopoly provider, TTEC must operate more transparently and collaboratively in its customer-facing operations.

In July 2020, Anand Low Price Supermarket filed a notice of application in the San Fernando High Court protesting a million-dollar fee demanded by TTEC in 2012 to supply electricity to its premises at Siparia Erin Road in Penal.

The action claimed that TTEC invoked its Capital Contribution Policy to meet expenses incurred by infrastructure to supply electricity to the location.

Other customers have since come along, benefiting from the new infrastructure and raising the question of how TTEC balances the cost of delivering electricity in remote areas and how that expense is shared when development is stimulated after electricity becomes available.

That need not be the case going forward.

TTEC is already moving forward with plans to supplement its supply with a solar farm venture in an effort to wean itself off expensive natural gas.

TT must embrace the energy generation revolution and the RIC should push TTEC to partner with the energy-consuming public in energy generation through widespread installation of solar panels.

Encouraging customer energy consumption also holds the potential to create an infrastructure that can feed supply from home and business installations back to the national grid.

That kind of forward-looking strategy would position TTEC as a distributor with suppliers numbering in the hundreds, offering more elasticity in generation than relying on a handful of high-energy providers.

The RIC must pursue its intended role as a regulator of successful utilities, not burdens on the Treasury.