Rate increase tough pill to swallow for Quebec churches
MONTREAL, QC—Some 220 Quebec churches will be facing significant increases in their electricity bills when Hydro Quebec's preferred rate by-energy program comes to an end on April 1, 2006.
The subsidy program began in the 1980s shortly after the huge excess capacity from new hydro-electric projects in northern Quebec came online.
"We created the by-energy program at that point for institutions and corporations that were heating with oil and were looking for a way to cut costs when the temperature dropped below a certain point," says Hydro Quebec spokesperson Isabelle Phoenix.
Subscribers were given a discounted rate that made it advantageous for many of them to add a supplementary heating system that allowed buildings to be heated with both hydro and oil, and then to switch to electric heating at very cold periods of the winter.
For Hydro Quebec, the program was a convenient way to earn returns from their excess available power—which now no longer exists.
In the current context, the reduced rate program no longer makes sense," Phoenix told ChristianWeek. "Energy costs have all risen, especially oil, and there no longer is the kind of surplus on the hydro-electric grid that existed in the '80s."
Many of the churches and other institutions who joined the program in the '80s only had oil-based heating systems and initially had to invest to retrofit their buildings with supplementary electrical heating equipment. While the program has lasted long enough for all of these churches to more than recoup their equipment investments, there is a sense in which the program really could not be ending at a worse time.
The recent dramatic increase in oil costs had prompted many churches to depend more heavily on the electrical heating option, which is now also going to see a dramatic increase in price.
According to Hydro Quebec's statistics, 400 of Quebec's 1,700 Roman Catholic churches are using electricity for some portion of their heating and 211 participated in the subsidy program.
There are also six Anglican churches and three other Protestant congregations participating in the program. The discounted rate was most beneficial to churches with larger buildings with the kind of high, vaulted architecture that makes them particularly difficult to heat and keep warm.
The Quebec assembly of Roman Catholic bishops has said the loss of the discounted rate will mean doubling the heating bill for some churches and will lead to some having to close during the cold winter months.
While no individual churches have yet expressed any specific plans to curtail their services, the effect will be particularly crippling for many parishes whose congregations are already struggling with increasing maintenance costs of aging and often inefficient buildings.
Phoenix says the end of the special rate was not a unilateral or sudden decision by the utility.
"Like every other rate change, this one was submitted to the electrical rate control board and went through the standard process of open public hearings during 2004. In the end the control board agreed that the utility's proposal to drop the program was appropriate and justified."
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