SouthEastern members, who are still reading their own meters and calculating their bills from rate schedule booklets, may have noticed that the charge each month for zero energy usage is $18.75 for residential accounts and $19.80 for all-electric accounts. This charge, which is typically referred to as a Customer Charge or Facility Charge, is the minimum amount utilities charge for making service available to the property.

Such charges are sometimes higher in rural areas due to the extra expense of making service available, and the average rural water district user pays a minimum Customer or Facility charge of about $25.00 each month, whether or not any water usage is recorded on the meter.  Likewise, telephone companies also have a basic fee, typically in the $30.00 range each month, even if there are no phone calls made during the billing period.

SouthEastern's basic charge which we refer to as a Customer Charge, like those of phone and water companies, includes the fixed costs of depreciation, interest, taxes, maintenance, operation and administration.  Each customer class is allocated a portion of those expenses based on the total cost of making service available.   Homes with electric heat and electric appliances, as a group, require larger transformers and higher capacity service conductors and therefore the monthly Customer Charge for "AH" or all-electric accounts is slightly higher than the residential monthly Customer Charge because of the extra cost of the larger transformers, services conductors and associated labor installation of that equipment.

Many electric cooperatives, including SouthEastern, do not try to recover all of their monthly fixed expenses through the Customer Charge alone, but instead rely on a tiered rate structure to recover a portion of it, and that is why the first 1,100 kilowatt-hours used by each SouthEastern residential account every month are priced slightly higher than energy usage over and above the 1,100 kilowatt threshold.

SouthEastern members who have already had AMR (automated meter reading) installed on their account by the Cooperative and who are receiving an invoice bill each month will notice that we have broken their bills down in a number of segments to show the charge for the first 1,100 kilowatt-hours of usage, the charge for any usage above 1,100 KWH, the Customer Charge, the Illinois Public Utility Revenue Tax charge and the charge for any options such as security lights or surge protection.

The AMR bill also contains a bar graph of the member's energy usage for previous months, the member's average kilowatt usage per day and the member's average electric energy cost per day, information which has been added to serve you better.

Thanks to those members who have called or written expressing their appreciation for the new invoice bill format and as always, "We'll keep the lights on for you!"