Santee Cooper, a state-owned utility serving 172,000 retail customers, has proposed a three-year rate plan that includes higher fixed charges and new DG surcharges. Santee Cooper’s proposal includes the following revisions:

• For residential customers, raising the monthly customer charge from $14.00 to $17.00 in 2016, to $19.50 in 2017, and to $21.00 in 2018, with lower kWh rates in 2017 and 2018.
• For general commercial service, raising the monthly customer charge from $18.00 to $21.00 in 2016, to $25.00 in 2017, and to $27.50 in 2018, with lower kWh rates by 2018.
• Creating a new DG rider that would apply to all retail DG customers, with residential systems capped at 20 kW and non-residential systems capped at 1 MW. Customer bills would include: (1) a metering charge, (2) a standby or demand charge (i.e., if a customer currently has a demand rate, they will not pay the standby charge, too), (3) energy charges for net consumption, and (4) energy credits from generation above on-site load.

Under Santee Cooper’s proposal, a residential customer under Schedule DG-16 would pay all of the following in 2016:  (1) a $17.00 monthly customer charge, (2) a $9.00 monthly metering charge, (3) a monthly charge equal to $4.70/kW of installed capacity, and (4) the applicable energy charge. The customer would receive an energy credit of $0.0389/kWh for kWh generated during summer months and $0.0381/kWh for kWh generated during non-summer months.