Letter to the Editor - I Trust Alliant's Ratepayers

Your financial contribution empowers watchdog reporting that protects and informs us all. Dear Editor, I would like to offer a more thorough analysis of electricity rates, comparing Alliant's rates to those of other electricity providers. I will begin with a comparison between Alliant and MidAmerican Energy, the two investor-owned utilities that serve large portions of Iowa. To see a service territory map for all electric utilities in Iowa go to https://iuc.iowa.gov/customer-assistance/utility-safety-tips/view-utility-service-area-map. Utility rates depend on the ratepayer class: residential, commercial, or industrial. We can compare Alliant vs. MidAmerican using data from the Iowa Utilities Commission (IUC) website: https://iuc.iowa.gov/records-documents/information-utility-annual-report-filings. In 2023, the residential rate was 17.86 cents/kWh for Alliant and 11 cents/kWh for MidAmerican. The 2023 commercial rate was 13 cents/kWh for Alliant and 8.71 cents/kWh for MidAmerican. The 2023 industrial rate was 7.92 cents/kWh for Alliant and 6.26 cents/kWh for MidAmerican. These rates are calculated in the IUC report as the total annual revenue divided by total energy delivered (kWh). This provides an average all-in rate for each customer class. It can be useful to convert the difference in rates to a difference in annual cost. Using the approximate average usage of 9,000 kWh per year, a residential customer would have paid $617 more in 2023 as an Alliant customer compared to a MidAmerican customer. A typical commercial customer would have paid $1030 more, based on median usage of 24,000 kWh per year. Some of MidAmerican's service territory includes the largest cities in Iowa. These higher density areas could result in lower costs from the utility. To account for that, we can look more broadly at rates across the county using data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA, https://www.eia.gov/electricity/sales_revenue_price/). Focusing on residential rates, the average rate per state ranges from 10.98 cents/kWh in Washington state to 29.88 cents/kWh in Connecticut. Only 11 states are above Alliant (17.86 cents/kwh), and only one of those 11 states is in the Midwest (Michigan at 18.84 cents/kWh). Seventy-five percent of U.S. states have an average rate that is below Alliant's residential rate. Note that MidAmerican's rate (11.00 cents/kWh) is near the bottom of this range. My next comparison is between Alliant's residential rate and the 30 other investor-owned utilities in the Midwest with at least 100,000 customers. The 2023 residential rates for these utilities ranged from 11.00 cents/kWh (MidAmerican) up to 19.72 cents/kWh (Madison Gas & Electric Co). Twenty-four of those 30 utilities are lower than Alliant's rate, putting Alliant at the 77th percentile. Several business groups in Iowa recently used the same EIA data when they issued a press release urging Iowa's legislators and regulators to rein in rising electricity costs in Iowa. These groups included the Iowa Economic Alliance, which represents large tech firms like Google and Facebook, Iowa Business for Clean Energy, and the Iowa Business Energy Coalition and the Large Energy Group, which both were intervenors in Alliant's most recent rate case before the Iowa Utilities Commission. Their press release resulted in articles published in the Des Moines Register and the Cedar Rapids Gazette. These Iowa business groups looked at electricity costs for some of the 181 electric utilities in Iowa (investor-owned, municipal, and rural cooperatives) drawing on data furnished by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (https://www.eia.gov/electricity/sales_revenue_price/). Looking at all of them, we find that Alliant's residential rate in 2023 (17.86 cents/kWh) was higher than 178 of these 181 electric utilities (98th percentile). Alliant's commercial rate in 2023 (13 cents/kWh) was larger than 130 of these 181 utilities (72nd percentile). None of the results above includes Alliant's latest rate increases that were approved by the IUC in 2024. In addition, Alliant wrote in its 2018 feasibility study that their rates would increase only 1% per year. In fact, they have increased by nearly 2.5% per year on average from 2018 to 2023 and by 2.74% per year from 2012 to 2023 (historical price data from Alliant's website). I trust Alliant's ratepayers in Decorah to draw their own conclusions from this data. Philip Iversen Decorah Iowa Join the community of savvy subscribers (for free)! Get the latest updates, tips, and insider information by subscribing to the free newsletter today.