Pay Your Rates!

The Post reports that Con Ed is raising electricity rates by 36 percent:

Con Edison is hiking the price of electricity for residential customers 36 percent this month — a $13 increase for a typical city two-bedroom home using 300 kilowatt-hours of electricity a month.

Steeper increases are in the offing for larger suburban-style homes. They use between 500 and 1,000 kilowatt-hours each month, and their owners could face increases of as much as $43 monthly. Blame Mother Nature and the markets, the utility says.

Hurricane Katrina made the natural-gas market unstable, and the cold weather is pushing electricity demand up, adding pressure for rate increases. Con Ed sets rates every three months but makes adjustments each month.

. . .

The high gas market prompted Con Ed to hike the price of energy for residential properties to almost 20 cents per kilowatt-hour in January, up from about 15 cents in both November and December, and 11 cents last April.

Olert said rates “probably will” continue to rise in 2006. “Most of the electricity that we buy is produced by natural gas. So it’s all linked to that.”