AKASH SAMA­ROO

As the Reg­u­lat­ed In­dus­tries Com­mis­sion be­gins its pub­lic con­sul­ta­tions on the pro­posed in­creas­es to your elec­tric­i­ty rates, the Com­mis­sion is ad­vis­ing peo­ple to come with their light bills.

RIC Ex­ec­u­tive Di­rec­tor Glenn Khan said if you do that, the Com­mis­sion will be able to as­cer­tain how much more your house­hold will have to pay. And he be­lieves once that is done, peo­ple will re­alise in a lot of cas­es, the in­crease is min­i­mal.

"We have some­thing like a bill cal­cu­la­tor,” Khan ex­plained, “so if you walk with your bill, we're go­ing to demon­strate to you what the ef­fect of the new prices will be and com­pare it to the old prices.  Es­sen­tial­ly, peo­ple will re­alise that the price change and the bill im­pact will be small—it may be $8 to $10 to $15 in some cas­es for peo­ple at the low­er end."

Those how­ev­er who are not on the low­er end risk pay­ing up to 64 per­cent more. RIC Chair Dawn Cal­len­der said, the key word for those cus­tomers is "con­ser­va­tion".

"We have peo­ple who live very lux­u­ri­ous lives in Trinidad and To­ba­go.  The rate in­crease is prob­a­bly not go­ing to both­er them one way or the oth­er and those would be the per­sons on the high­er end on the scale—they may be fac­ing the 64% in­crease,” Cal­len­der point­ed out.

“But our mes­sage to them is re­al­ly about con­ser­va­tion,” she em­pha­sised.  “We are fac­ing the glob­al warm­ing is­sue as a coun­try. We have our own tar­gets, and we want to en­cour­age our cit­i­zens to con­sume elec­tric­i­ty in a way to as­sist in meet­ing those tar­gets."

Ac­cord­ing to the RIC's Pub­lic Con­sul­ta­tion Sched­ule, the next pub­lic meet­ing is at the Cen­tre of Ex­cel­lence on Tues­day, Jan­u­ary 17, and then at the Ari­ma Com­mu­ni­ty Cen­tre on Thurs­day, Jan­u­ary 19.