ELECTRICITY TARIFFS DROP TO SEVEN-YEAR LOW

St. Lucia Electricity Services Limited (LUCELEC) announced on Friday that its customers will see significant reductions in what they pay per unit of electricity. For bills going out this month, residential customers will pay 63.6 cents per kilowatt-hour for the first 180 units, and 68.6 cents per kilowatt-hour thereafter. Hotels, industrial and commercial customers will pay 74.6 cents per kilowatt-hour for high tension and 78.6 cents per kilowatt-hour at low tension. Street lighting will be billed at 78.1 cents per unit.

The new rates are nearly 22 cents lower than what customers paid in February 2015 and 8 cents lower than what customers paid last month, continuing the steady decline in electricity rates over the past several months. LUCELEC’s Managing Director, Trevor Louisy, says customers are currently paying what they paid for electricity as far back as 2009.

“The reductions come as a result of a combination of factors. There’s the annual computation of the basic tariff which happens in January every year, as required by law. This resulted in an almost 10% reduction in the basic tariff for each category of customers. Coupled with that is the lower price that LUCELEC paid for fuel during the month of January resulting in what is called a negative fuel surcharge that saw a further reduction in the basic tariff of 18.7 cents per unit,” Mr. Louisy explained.