Electrical rate info and more
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Editor,
If you are a customer of Mission Valley Power (MVP) you have no doubt noticed a huge
increase in your electric bills the last two years, and another increase is coming in 2026.
You have also noticed there is a 3-tier rate system, where the more you use the higher the per KWH rate is. My family has rented an all-electric house (including heat) for 10 years and the last bill my landlord presented me with for January was twice as what it was two years ago.
I just checked Missoula Electric Co-Op (MEC). They have a flat rate of 6.99 cents whereas MVP has a rate of 8.8 cents under 1000 KWH used, 9.83 cents for over 1000 KWH, and 12.19 cents per KWH for over 2000 KWH used. Why is Missoula’s rate so much cheaper?
So if you use more than 2000 KWH per month you are paying 74% more than MEC customers. Something is wrong here, how can this be? I checked out seven electric co-ops in Montana and Wyoming. Five had a flat rate and two had a tiered rate system where you paid less for using more, as it should be, not paying more as with MVP.
And another interesting and unbelievable fact - even though we have the SKQ Dam (formerly
Kerr Dam) in our back yard, Mission Valley Power receives less than 5% (4.5%) from the SKQ
Dam. The other 95.5% comes from Bonneville Power.
I have asked over 25 people to guess how much power SKQ supplies to MVP. About 80%
said they thought 100%, and the others guessed 50 - 80%. Their jaws dropped when I told them less than 5%. Almost all of the power generated from the SKQ Dam goes out of state. And I am told a great deal of that power is used by a BitCoin Mining company. Kerr Dam was built decades ago to supply low cost power to the irrigators and residents of the Flathead Reservation. So why is it that now, instead of serving MVP with all of their electric it is being sold out of state?
John Meinders
Mission
