Skip to content
Link copied to clipboard

N.J. electric rates heading south this year

Electricity rates will go down about 3 percent on June 1 for residential and small-business customers in South Jersey following this week's annual electricity auction for basic generation service.

A typical monthly bill will go down $4.14, or 3.3 percent, for a customer of Atlantic City Electric who uses 650 kilowatt hours, and $3, or 2.6 percent, for customers of Public Service Electric & Gas Co., the state Board of Public Utilities announced Friday. The BPU supervised the auction process.

The annual auction of three-year contracts sets the price for a portion of the power supply for the majority of customers, who do not shop for third-party suppliers. Most of the price was set in previous years' auctions of three-year contracts.

Prices in this year's auction in the state's four electric-utility territories decreased between 5.3 percent and 8.1 percent over last year's auction, the BPU said. The prices are 6.8 percent to 18.2 percent less expensive than the expiring contracts from 2014.

The auctions affect only the generation or power-supply portion of the electric bill. Customers also pay a distribution charge, which is set by the BPU and covers a utility's cost for delivering electricity to customers over its network.