Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, February 20, 1993 TAG: 9302200119
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
APCO: TAX RAISES ANNUAL RESIDENTIAL RATE BY $34
Appalachian Power Co. said its average residential customer will pay about $34 more a year for electricity if President Clinton's energy tax becomes law.That would amount to an increase of 4.8 percent for a user of 12,474 kilowatt hours, the utility said Friday.
Typical residential customers of the eight operating companies of Apco's parent, American Electric Power Co., would pay about $31 in additional electric bills under the proposed legislation. A typical AEP residential customer uses 10,980 kilowatt hours a year and would pay 4.6 percent more under Clinton's plan.
The proposed energy tax of 25.7 cents per million British thermal units of fuel would cost Apco customers a total of almost $61 million and AEP customers almost $240 million, the companies said.
Apco's commercial customers would pay 5.1 percent more; and industrial customers, the largest users of power, would pay 6.8 percent more. AEP's average for its operating companies would be 4.9 percent more for commercial and 7.2 percent more for industrial customers.
Richard Disbrow, AEP chairman, said his company wants to work with Clinton on the "tough deficit problem, and we recognize the need to raise revenues, but it would be unfortunate to derail our fragile economic recovery in the process."
Injecting energy taxes into the mix, together with a possible increase in corporate taxes, "could damage our industrial customers' efforts to meet world-class competition," Disbrow said.
AEP's top 15 industrial customers alone would have to pay $40 million in new taxes, he said, and all industrial customers will pay more than $100 million in new energy tax-related fuel costs if Congress passes the Clinton plan.