BGE Wrongly Asking Customers to Pay Twice for Reliability

With the constant outages being experienced in Howard County- and elsewhere in BGE's service territory- we constantly see the utility demand higher rates to pay for upgrading its reliability.

But, wait a minute: doesn't BGE already get paid to repair, maintain, and upgrade its lines?

The answer is YES. BGE charges its residential ratepayers 2.527 ckwh- for every kilowatt hour of electricity consumed- to pay for its delivery of electricity to households. The typical home uses 12,000 kwh of power a year, so this comes to a hefty $303 per year. In addition, BGE assesses a monthly distribution fee of $7.50, which comes to $90 a year. (You can find these charges outline on page 3 of Schedule R, a filing BGE makes to inform customers of its rates):

http://www.bge.com/myaccount/billsrates/ratestariffs/electricservice/Electric%20Services%20Rates%20and%20Tariffs/P3_SCH_R.pdf

Together, these two fees cost the typical BGE residential consumer almost $400 a year. 

That $400 is supposed to be used to maintain BGE's infrastructure. It's supposed to use these funds to trim trees, repair lines, provide for depreciation, and plan upgrades on poles and powerlines. 

There are 1.1 million residential ratepayers, so do the math: BGE receives $440 million dollars from households to maintain its power lines.

Commerical and Industrial customers number 100,000, but actually this category of consumers use much more power overall: about 60% of BGE's annual electricity bill is for office buildings and factories. BGE families, on the other hand, use just 40% of the total. 

Combined, I've estimated that all BGE customers- residential, commerical/industrial-  together provide $1 BILLION DOLLARS to BGE annually for the repair, maintenance, and upgrade of BGE's distribution lines. Why, then, does BGE demand yet more money for this same job?

BGE wants to charge its customers TWICE for the same service!?