In 2025, the average BGE bill for a home that has a gas furnace, will be an astounding $3,750. In 2021, the same bill was about 50% less. There’s a practical legislative bill that will slow the rise of home heating bills.
Open your January utility bill and you’ll know why there’s lots of talk about expensive energy bills. Are rates higher due to our PJM electricity grid? Is it BGE’s “Operation Pipeline” spending? Could the new retail energy reform bill SB1 be to blame? Clean energy? Is it because we import electricity? More importantly, what can be done to give consumers rate relief?
Last year’s SB1 consumer retail energy reform went into effect on Jan. 1, 2025, and consumers are getting rate relief. Because most of the remaining 285,000 residential third-party energy contracts are on pricey variable rates. SB1 eliminated variable rates and these families will see their electricity and gas supply rates drop to regulated levels in the next few weeks. Thanks to SB1, those families will save about $200 million in 2025.
In 2025, utility bills are climbing for two reasons.
Every family, in every utility service territory will pay higher electricity supply rates because wholesale rates are higher. Statewide, electricity supply rates jumped from 7 cents per kilowatt hour in 2021 to 12 cents in 2024. In 2025, electricity supply rates will jolt to roughly 13 cents per kilowatt hour because of the mismanaged PJM capacity auction. While painful, this rate increase is hopefully temporary, and largely out of state legislators’ and regulators’ control.