On Tuesday, FirstEnergy Pennsylvania (FE PA) announced it had filed a rate adjustment request with the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission.
The rate hike, if approved, would see Pennsylvania residential customers paying an additional $16.61 to $21.30 per month, an increase of between 9.2 percent and 11.8 percent. FirstEnergy Pennsylvania is a subsidiary of FirstEnergy Corporation and does business in Pennsylvania as Met-Ed, Penn Power, Penelec, and West Penn Power. It is the first rate hike for the company since 2017.
Officials with the company said the increase would allow it to make investments into resiliency and reliability.
“Continued investments in a smart, modern energy grid coupled with an expanded vegetation management program that targets trees threatening our equipment will help us deliver on our commitment to providing dependable electricity to homes, businesses and communities,” Scott Wyman, President of FirstEnergy’s Pennsylvania Operations, said. “The work we are doing makes a positive difference – installation of new equipment coupled with proactive tree trimming has helped reduce the frequency of electric service interruptions experienced by our Pennsylvania customers by 14 percent since 2019. This rate proposal balances the need to invest in the system while helping keep electric bills comparable to other utilities in the state.”
FE PA’s rate request totals $502 million across four Pennsylvania rate districts. The “rate proposal,” officials said would benefit more than two million customers by reducing or minimizing outages throughout its service territory and enhancing key services. The request would fund modernizing the grid, increasing the frequency of overhead circuit and transformer inspections, converting 85,000 company-owned streetlights to energy-efficient LED streetlights to save electricity and money, enhanced tree and limb removal, creating an Energy Assistance Outreach Team to increase awareness and participation in energy assistance programs for low-income customers, and creating an electric vehicle (EV) pilot program to provide rebates for EV home chargers.