Tony Anderson – Availability Charge

Video Transcript:

Availability charge is one pot of money we have to recover revenue at Cherryland Electric Cooperative. The other pot is the energy charge. The availability charge is a fixed pot, that’s a fixed line item on your bill and currently it is thirteen dollars a month at our cooperative. The availability charge is designed to recover for all the costs the cooperative has invested in poles, wires and transformers, to have electricity available to you. If you want the ability to flip a switch and have electricity there is a cost and that cost is wrapped in to all the infrastructure that delivers electricity to your home. That’s what we put into the availability charge, that pot of fixed money. Therefore if no one on our system uses electricity we still have everybody’s availability charge and we are still able to pay the bank and keep our operation going. The rest of the revenue comes from the energy charge, which is a whole different issue when you start to use electricity in your home. But the fixed monthly charge is the availability charge and that’s to have electricity available.