Black Hills Energy filed a rate case with the Colorado Public Utilities Commission on 12 June asking for $26,663,479 more a year from the roughly 101,700 electric customers it serves around Pueblo, Cañon City and the rest of southern Colorado. The page it built for customers explains the request in terms of a typical bill: an increase of $10.90 a month, or 8.8 per cent. That is accurate. It is also the number after a credit that the same filing says runs for two years.
The document that shows both is the company’s own customer notice, filed as an attachment to Advice Letter 912 and mailed to customers as the statute requires. Its table gives a residential bill at 600 kWh a month rising from $124.18 to $142.48 — $18.30, or 14.7 per cent — and then a second line applying a credit of $7.40 to reach $135.08, the 8.8 per cent figure. The phrase “14.7” appears nowhere on the company’s rate-review page; “8.8%” appears twice. The notice itself is the only PDF linked from that page.
The credit is not a discount the company is offering. It is a refund. Black Hills is holding about $37.4 million that belongs to customers — $29.4 million from a renewable energy standard adjustment and $8 million from a clean energy plan rider — and is returning it through a negative surcharge applied to base-rate charges. The filed tariff sheet is explicit about the duration: the negative adjustment “is intended to be in effect for a period of 24 months beginning on the effective date listed in this immediate tariff sheet”, after which a compliance filing on two days’ notice sets it to zero. From roughly March 2029, on the company’s own timetable, the same tariff produces the $142.48 bill.
The credit is also not uniform. The tariff sets it as a percentage cut to each class’s base-rate charges: 6.55 per cent for residential, 6.06 for residential other, 8.05 for small general service, 4.08 for irrigation, 6.48 for lighting, and between zero and 12.30 per cent for the large-power classes. Because base rates are about 69 per cent of a residential bill today, the residential credit works out at 5.2 per cent of the total.
What the filing does to the structure of the bill matters more than the headline for the smallest households. The fixed monthly service charge goes from $8.77 to $12.00, up 36.8 per cent. The energy rate, currently 12.159 cents for the first 500 kWh and 15.807 cents thereafter, becomes a flat 16 cents. Running those through, base-rate charges before the credit rise 33.8 per cent for a household at 100 kWh a month, 32.3 per cent at 500, 26.5 per cent at 600, 15.7 per cent at 1,000 and 8.3 per cent at 2,000. While the 24-month credit is running, the same households see 25.0, 23.6, 18.2, 8.2 and 1.2 per cent.
Those are not hypothetical households. Federal energy data for 2024 puts Black Hills’ southern Colorado residential customers at an average of 571 kWh a month, the lowest of any Colorado utility with a meaningful residential book — below Public Service Company of Colorado at 600 — while paying 17.05 cents a kWh, the highest in the state. The next highest are United Power at 15.75 cents, Mountain View Electric at 15.52, Public Service at 15.05, CORE Electric at 15.04 and Colorado Springs Utilities at 14.45.
None of this is hidden. The notice was mailed to customers, the advice letter says so on its face, and both the 14.7 and the 8.8 per cent figures are printed in it. What the company chose is which of the two to put on the page most customers will see, and to describe a two-year price as the price.
The Commission has not decided anything yet, and its record suggests it may not grant much. A decision is expected in or before March 2027. In the previous Black Hills electric case the Commission approved about $17.0 million of roughly $37 million sought, raised to about $17.5 million on rehearing, at an authorised return on equity of 9.3 to 9.5 per cent against the 10.5 per cent requested — 47 per cent of the request. The figures here are the company’s proposal, not the outcome. The docket itself, 26AL-0232E, could not be read directly: the Commission’s e-filing search is gated behind a bot check.