Understand Your Delivery Rates

Understand Your Delivery Rates 

A delivery rate is the price you pay to have your electricity delivered to your home. It covers the cost of maintenance, upkeep, and all the little things that go into making sure you have the energy you need, when you need it.

North Bay Hydro includes the cost of delivering electricity to customer’s properties on their bill under the Delivery Charge. A portion of the delivery charge is calculated at a fixed amount. The rest of the charges increase or decrease depending on the amount of electricity you use. For an average medium density residential customer who uses 800 kWh a month the Delivery Charge represent approximately 38% of the total bill. North Bay Hydro owns and is responsible for this portion of the bill.

 What Do Your Delivery Charges Pay For?

This Delivery line on your bill, is the part of the bill that North Bay Hydro is responsible for. We deliver your electricity but don’t generate it. The pie chart below shows how the money is spent.

How Do We Deliver Electricity?
 
For something that’s invisible, it takes a massive amount of infrastructure to deliver electricity to your homes and businesses. In fact, North Bay Hydro owns and manages a huge infrastructure just to make sure every time you flip the light switch the room lights up.

Electricity is created by harnessing other power sources with windmills, nuclear power plants, hydro-electric dams, natural gas or burning coal across the province. It then travels about 300,000 kilometers an hour across transmission towers, through transformer stations, across feeder lines to distribution stations, to power lines, through transformers, through your meter and into your home.

We deliver your electricity through our transmission and distribution systems safely and reliably but don’t generate the electricity.

 

How Delivery Charges Are Calculated?

A portion of the delivery charge is calculated at a fixed amount. The rest of the charges increase or decrease depending on the amount of electricity you use, giving you another way to control your electricity costs. The Delivery line on your bill is made up of the following charges:

 In addition, an adjustment for line losses and a smart meter entity charge are also included in the Delivery line on your bill. The smart meter entity charge of $0.79 per month is only collected from residential and general service energy-billed customers. We collect this charge on behalf of the IESO. The charge will be in effect until October 31, 2018. ​

Why Do I Have To Pay for Electricity Lost On It’s Journey from

Generation to Me?

When electricity is transmitted over long distances and passes through wires and transformers, it is normal for a small amount of power to be used or lost as heat. Electricity line losses are an unavoidable part of the electricity distribution business. For example, if we deliver 1,000 kWh to you, we must purchase a small amount more than what you use. To determine the amount of electricity we need to buy for you, we use a calculation called an “adjustment factor.”

How do we arrive at the adjustment factor? We calculate the adjustment factor by comparing the total amount of electricity we buy on behalf of all our customers to the amount of electricity we deliver to their homes and businesses. Once we compare how much electricity we purchased to the amount of electricity used by customers, we can arrive at how much electricity was lost during delivery. Adjustment factors are reviewed and approved by the Ontario Energy Board and will vary according to your service type.